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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24087328">kicking death in the ass while singing</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/usedtobebird/pseuds/usedtobebird'>usedtobebird</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>BAMF Jaskier | Dandelion, Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon Ships It, Dissociation, Emotionally Constipated Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia Has Feelings, Graphic Description of Corpses, Immortal Jaskier | Dandelion, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Insecure Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion Whump, M/M, Poetic, Post-Episode: S01E06 Rare Species, Vignette, but also before during and after because timelines are confusing and damnit i'm on brand, i mean i hope it is, yennefer makes an appearance because she's a bitch but i love her</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 22:07:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>21,245</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24087328</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/usedtobebird/pseuds/usedtobebird</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>After birthing himself from a fresh grave lifetime-decades ago, Jaskier has played the bard across the continent. He is content because he is who he chooses to be: safely forgettable; a weed who makes music.</p><p>… Until the witcher, and the child surprise. Until the war. If he runs from his birthright, he risks the lives of everyone whom he ever held dear. If he embraces it – he loses them anyway.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>228</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. part 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Notes: </strong>
</p><p>I was feeling really sad (lonely, plague-times if you’re not here in 2020, people I know are dying), it was raining, and I was reading up on the fucked mythology of Poland (I mean dude I get it y’all seen some shit) and wondered what would make a lil’ bard leave luxury and somehow never age. (I <em>know</em> the witcher crew just plum forgot to make Jaskier old but I want my lil’ b to stick around ;_;)</p><p>I wrote this in vignettes because <strike>(I suck at finishing novels) </strike> I want to practice writing more poetic shit but with more character introspection. I love the concept of stories connected to a singular vine (vignette means vine specifically the kind used to decorate books back in ye olde days heh English teacher can ya tell).</p><p>I apologize for this weird-ass experimental verbiage that is <em>VERY </em>purple prose-y and very <em>weird,</em> but it’s what m’brain wanted.</p><p>I’ve only really seen the show – haven’t suffered through the gameplay of Witcher 3 but I’m working on it, so apologies if I got <em>everything</em> wrong (hey Nilfgaard is by a desert so assume they’re the Roman empire, ya feel?)</p><p>Title is from Charles Bukowski.</p><p>Ass-loads of notes at the bottom.</p><p>
  <strong>Please know this is a non-linear story ‘cause The Witcher is confusing with its timelines and damnit I’m on brand.</strong>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><ol>
<li><b> singularity</b></li>
</ol><p>He hears music everywhere.</p><p>He loves it; didn’t know what it was until he grew his own. The world was his teacher and a lute, he grasped, was even better than his voice. When he finally left his sire’s house, Jaskier learned how to feel free under a booming endless sky; took inspiration from the hissing sibilance of a stream; found a friend in the forests: quiet, so hushed, the unspeaking ancients offering a hum to lull him back to sleep after waking, quaking, terrified he’d be found with grave dirt still caked under his nails.</p><p>This, he knows: he is not <em> supposed </em> to know. He was not bred to hear these things. His song, should he have one, was to be crafted from steel and accompanied by screams, ending – always endings – with a dirge as the gods fell from the sky because he’d killed them.</p><p>This, too, he knows: that is all horseshit.</p><p>He is Jaskier: bard, friend to flowers, lover of sunshine (a desert-child first). And he hears music everywhere.</p><p>He has learned: rain is soft, titillating; a tease. He wishes there were an instrument to properly convey the sly wet drops who fall from the sky and slap the ground. Babies’ giggles remind him of spring showers; separated lovers of a windy storm. Jaskier loves the rain.</p><p>He knows, intimately: grief is thick, soupy, slow. You cannot set the pace; you may only bear it.</p><p>Hope is sour.</p><p>Love is… bells. Chimes, maybe. Laughter was the greatest parallel he could draw to it.</p><p>And death is silent. Screaming, missing, gnashing absence. It is like the world is muted – like your voice never existed. This is what haunts Jaskier in his dreams.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       2: his type</b>
</p><p>If Jaskier is a minstrel, Geralt is a dancer. He knows this because he, too, thought he was being taught to dance once upon a time.</p><p>The witcher is a feast for the eyes to devour when he wields his swords, each as large as a man and twice as heavy. He is magnificence in monochrome: twisting and flaying with an <em> allongé </em> back to first position, only to do it all over again. He is predictable; he is chaos. Before… everything ended, Jaskier had heard bells amidst the <em> clang-clang </em> staccato of steel and had watched, breathless, hopelessly drawn to a pursuit he’d buried long ago.</p><p>He didn’t feel shame, with Geralt. Geralt makes it look beautiful.</p><p>Jaskier had preferred daggers – soft, quick little things that you cannot see coming and rarely value as a threat. The tiny blade is what had inspired him to mold himself into Jaskier: flighty, prissy, secured by silk – a person nobody would look twice at as a danger. A person someone might choose, first.</p><p>(He isn’t; he’s nobody’s choice.</p><p>He hopes for a while</p><p>but hope sounds like falsity, like a note that had started sweet and gone sour.</p><p>He finds that it is not dissimilar to longing, or craving.</p><p>Or separation, E-flat.)</p><p>Sometimes on quiet nights, when Geralt was bathed in firelight (which is an eclectic mix of crackling, whipping, gooey warmth tones, like the slow slide of honey across your tongue), he would catch Jaskier watching him clean his swords. He loves them, in a way; it is evident in the care he takes after every display of their cold bodies, every time he asks for their assistance to rid the world of blight.</p><p>Geralt would perform this ceremony of cleaning his swords whether he was covered in the bowels of creatures, amongst a queen’s court, or in a borrowed hearth of a grateful townsfolk – in short, anywhere. Jaskier would pluck away in time with Geralt’s strokes of the blade, pretending not to watch, and he’d <em> loved </em> listening to the complimentary soft exhalations of the stars when they made camp in the wilds. Starlight has always reminded him of throaty, warbled breaths, like a sleeping lover. Jaskier had liked to watch him – and pretend. Jaskier has aways been good at pretending.</p><p>One particular evening, well before Roach had stopped treating Jaskier like a boil on her arse, the witcher had finished his bounty of a kikimora’s head – which the horse had reproachfully bucked off her hind as soon as they’d dismounted. Jaskier had gotten ooze in his foxskin shoes. As he’d cleaned his swords (and as Jaskier had tried to extract monster brains from his stockings), Geralt had caught him looking because the bard had forgotten himself. This was notable in Jaskier’s vast memory because Geralt hardly ever caught Jaskier, in any of the things a bard shouldn’t be doing.</p><p>“Does it scare you, bard?” Geralt had asked, referring to – oh, his sword or his lifestyle perhaps, in that lovely rumble. He hadn’t figured out <em> why </em>Jaskier had been looking but this – this speaking – was even better. Sometimes (often), Jaskier had wanted to ask him to just speak, just to hear the bass tones that reverberated from his chest, wanted to bask in them – he’s heard similar notes in mountains, in oceans, from planets. In magic.</p><p>Well – far be it from a bard to tell the gods’ honest truth. At least he’s always been dishonest, no matter what name he wore.</p><p>“If <em> ‘it’ </em> is anything other than a venereal disease,” Jaskier had twinkled out a high-noted jingle, playing off both of their good moods and directing Geralt’s attention away from what Jaskier had <em> actually </em> been mooning at, “then no, dear witcher. You know I am fearless.”</p><p>The snort had sounded punched from him, like the witcher’s body couldn’t help but react to that ridiculous statement with an ugly laugh. Jaskier had heard bells.</p><p>“Oh? Did the kikimora have the clap?” Geralt had asked while looking at him with his brow raised as high as the corner of a smile. <em>Oh</em>, Jaskier had sighed quietly into his lute, but gold had always been Jaskier’s favorite color.</p><p>(Jaskier remembers this lovesick notion of the goddamn witcher’s <em> eyes</em>,</p><p>well after getting tossed off the mountain, while soaked in ale in a corner of Sodden Hill</p><p>because he is pathetic.</p><p>That has not happened yet, though. In this moment, he is enamored.</p><p>In this moment, he feels chosen.)</p><p>Jaskier had heard the hilarity – predictably, sounding like bubbles – fizzing from the witcher’s lips and had responded by dropping his mouth in a scandalous gasp, emulating a fish.</p><p>“<em>That’s </em> why I was terrified? I had wondered why— oh, Geralt,” here he’d scrambled to attention, giving a sloppy heart-salute. “Ohh-ho-ho Geralt, you are a gift to humanity, truly. The kikimora clap,” and his face must have looked truly tragic to have softened Geralt’s lips into a smile, “why, just Imagine the <em> sores </em> that thing could have <em> produced </em> on a man’s tackle! His sweet ploughshare, his—” he remembers gesturing here to his pelvis “– his indominable staff of <em> life</em>!”</p><p>As a child, he used to practice himself in the river after the washwoman who cared for him had finally succumbed to the cloudy softness of sleep and he could find a mirror. For hours, he’d flail his arms, pair them with faces, and watch his choppy reflection’s pantomime. He’d do it again and again until it didn’t look like he was parrying strokes, like he wasn’t trying to advance; like he didn’t see everyone as a threat; as if he’d never even seen a blade in his life. As if he were a fool.</p><p>Geralt didn’t see his words for the deflection they were; he never did. He never had. That’s when Jaskier knew he was good – not even a witcher could spot him.</p><p>“Didn’t know that was your type,” Geralt had laughed, quietly ducking his head to hide it, “I’ll be sure to leave you and the next kikimora alone.” His soft timber had boomed like Jaskier’s heartbeat, like bells, in Jaskier’s chest.</p><p>Now – after the mountain, after heartsickness had truly clamped its claws into his chest – as Jaskier drags his feet down the steep decline after being told he is the source of Geralt’s ire, of every woe he’d ever faced, of his own heartbreak (which just sounds like shattering, like glass falling around Geralt’s defeated stance), he hears nothing but the beating of his own heart.</p><p>It is weak. And he is a fool to think the witcher couldn’t sense his kind coming.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       3: beneath the mountain and far away.</b>
</p><p>Jaskier doesn’t attend his father’s funeral.</p><p>Well – it’s not like he was <em> invited</em>. The family probably thought he was still where they’d left him, locked up and shut away from the world <em> (where you belong, underneath it). </em> Little did they know, Jaskier hummed as he wrapped his lips back around the mug housing his pint.</p><p>On any other day, the news of his whoreson father’s demise would have prompted a celebration worthy of the fêtes of Cintra. Jaskier hid his face behind the ale and allowed himself the space to imagine it: wine flowing like waterfalls and soaking scantily clad smiling women; colors festooning those dark and decaying halls (<em>all </em> colors, even the blues); everyone, even witchers, would be <em> singing, </em> chanting almost; and the dancing – no shoes, just skin and tied up skirts and sweat, he would <em> bruise </em> his feet pounding out the drumbeat – would rattle his father’s coffin, which would probably be of a much thicker cut in wood and dripping in gold, unlike his own had been, until his corpse fell off the world.</p><p>No, he hadn’t attended the grim event. There are no invitations for dead men.</p><p>But he’d heard the news whispered amongst the local patrons of the tavern – the only damn building that wasn’t leaning like an old crone’s spine in this soggy coastal town – that his dear old dad was dead. Jaskier was close enough to the border, had made it all the way to Nazair, that public sympathy for the empire was shared openly. <em> Such a shame, that’s the last of the family</em>, they shook their heads. <em> All those sons o’ his, died as babes. Such tragedy, that family of warriors, </em>they tsked.</p><p>
  <em> (Such a waste.) </em>
</p><p>Jaskier ordered another flagon he couldn’t afford, savoring the wet glide of his palms around the molded clay. He’d traded his fine silks already but didn’t need many clothes for the journey (he was a desert-child first); his lute was badly in need of some linseed oil and new catgut strings; his stomach empty but for the liquid courage already bubbling inside. He badly needed to save the few coins he had left.</p><p>But he <em> needed </em> this. He did. He needed help to forget – everything.</p><p>As the other drunkards considered military politics, Jaskier consulted the yeast in his cup. Perhaps it was time for another reinvention, he mused as the ale went sweetly down his throat and warmed his belly. Juliański was dead and long gone, Dandelion: a child’s dream, and Jaskier was getting old, shattered. He was abandoned, penniless – friendless. Maybe it was past due for a new person to be borne—</p><p>
  <em> —His father was dead. </em>
</p><p>This thought shocked him, no matter how many times he returned to it, the ale hastening his lapses of memory.</p><p>Death. His thoughts turned to it – as they did, Jaskier heard a ringing in his ears.</p><p>He <em> had </em> wondered if he was the only one seemingly immune to it in his family. His father had lived the extraordinary lifespan of their kind but he, too, had succumbed to it. Jaskier stretched out a hand, observing the calluses bards don’t have. Well – perhaps his days were numbered. Apple-from-tree and all that (but Jaskier didn’t even have <em> wrinkles </em>—)</p><p>He wondered if his father had been buried with his blessed son’s skull over his own, as is custom. But they’d all died years ago – or, well, something close to it— and exhumation risked ghoul infestations; who would bother waking an alghoul for a fallen dynasty’s pagan rituals of death?</p><p>He wondered if anyone had touched his cold face to anoint the blood-tears beneath his eyes, so his bannermen could see he’d wept for them. Wondered if the Nilfgaard elite had thrown fire into the sky to honor him.</p><p>Questioned why he <em> cared. </em></p><p>He – he wondered if they’d even bothered with a funeral for <em> him </em> – Juliański. He hadn’t attended, obviously; no funerals for dead men, especially if they’re still walking. He wasn’t entirely sure what one was like outside of a scribe’s recollections.</p><p>But, Jaskier vaguely remembered his <em> brother</em>’s funeral when he was a child of seven summers. His brother had been fourth in line to inherit, the last of his father’s true-born sons. Usually, warm summer colors were everywhere in the countryside; even in the contradictory cold halls of his desert-birth were golds and corals, peaches and rosebud reds; buttercups. A country celebrated by the sun worshiped it in kind – but funerals were bleak. Black. Guttural, ugly things; made worse by the death of a child, tragic only because he’d failed in his training and cast a black mark on the family crest.</p><p>Each dead son – four in all – had etched another crack in his father’s face, which had held deep-set wrinkles that spoke of a grief he didn’t feel. Jaskier wondered if his own demise had… but, no. <em> His </em> was the greatest shame.</p><p>Shame sounds like dust – infinitesimal and everywhere, shedding from your skin. He’d heard it everywhere around his father.</p><p>Of the funeral, all Jaskier remembered were the corpse-cold cheeks of his brother’s still body – the son had been given no skull to wear into victorious death, a true mark of ignominy – and being made to feel shame for touching his brother. <em> Don’t handle the worthless dead</em>, his father had hissed at his fourth son's funeral. <em> He is unclean; do not dirty yourself with his failure. </em></p><p>He had wished his father wouldn’t speak so ill; the dead are terribly lonely. His dead brother had wept, for no one had held his hand in the end, and Jaskier had been confused on why no one had reacted to his cries. Jaskier thinks back to watching his father spit upon his son's cold corpse in a catacomb of people who wouldn't stop staring at Jaskier and wondered if maybe he hadn't been the only one to hear the dead child crying.</p><p>As a babe, Jaskier could think of no other reason to defy the dead’s final wishes. They were <em> dead</em>, after all; what harm could holding a dead prince’s hand do? But later – much later, after people whispered to him from graveyards, deep beneath soil and rock, and he’d cried himself to sleep in a confused washerwoman’s arms – Jaskier knew no one else could hear them.</p><p>—His father was dead.</p><p>At least, no one left <em>alive</em> could hear them. It was a friendless thought.</p><p>Jaskier wasn’t sure he was ever meant to know this – that the dead weren't as asleep as people presumed. No one taught him, no one had asked. But this, too, he remembered: his brother staring at him with baleful, clouded, <em> open </em> eyes as the fires consumed his body, the stab wound raw, uncovered, left to rot in the flames. The one Juliański had put there.</p><p>The fourth-born’s failure - the child’s death sentence - was in not killing him.</p><p>The funeral had been deafening. Death is ear-splitting in its emptiness. <em>Blood is everything, Juliański, </em> his father had said with a heavy hand on his surviving child’s shoulder. He had felt so alone. <em> Do not sully yours.</em></p><p>Before he leaves for the borders of Nilfgaard, Jaskier sells his lute and tries to bury himself with it. He is tired of music.</p><p>(He is not worthy of it.)</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       4: power</b>
</p><p>Jaskier had never wanted power, not really. He preferred the simpler pleasures: safety, sex, silliness. Song.</p><p><em> A laugh can cure anything</em>, an old washwoman with beautiful, swollen hands had told him once. He’d thought it was beautiful – that <em> she </em>was beautiful – and had adopted that mentality, had it grafted onto his bones. Creation had been limitless, as a child. He felt like he'd crawled out of hell and into a garden with a holy woman as a nanny.</p><p>Now - he couldn’t remember her face.</p><p>He remembered her hands better. At night, he would help pour the buttery oil, massage it into the cracks in her old fingers when her hands ached and swelled from the harsh lye her clients soaked them in. Those same hands mixed the pork lard into the cornmeal for their humble feast and fed it to her with his own rough palms, peppered with calluses no child should have.</p><p>Her face was – it had been so <em> long </em> since he’d seen her. Jaskier just remembered that he’d been loved, possibly for the only time, beloved in their palace of sticks and hay and shit. It had been the opposite of Nilfgaard: home. He couldn’t <em> remember </em> her face, though, and right now he was trying very hard to forget another’s.</p><p>The witcher had never been so kind as she, hadn’t actually chosen Jaskier, but – but Jaskier’d massaged the tension from his shoulders too, hadn’t he? He had swaddled his wounds and tucked extra-busked coin into his armor when he’d leave him behind and brushed his hair out when allowed to, twice more for luck. His hands had felt raw, too, after washing the witcher’s clothes, but he’d had no coin left for oil. The Elvish gypsy king had taken his pound of flesh after all – from Jaskier’s fingers.</p><p>Jaskier goes south – has been going south. North there be dragons and a reminder that he was never going to be anyone’s first choice.</p><p>He goes south and sings no songs, despite carrying a bardic tool, despite the haggard faces flowing against him all starved for scraps of happiness. He sees them looking hopefully at his instrument before witnessing his face, and then they never ask for music.</p><p>He is afraid to look at himself, sometimes. He’s never liked what stares back at him, no matter who he is.</p><p>He goes south, the tongues of his shoes as warn as the one he composed with and is reminded of the war he wants no part of – some might call it his birthright – coming to meet him. He knows, instinctively, where the blood is spilled heaviest, like an uncorked barrel of wine belching out its contents and oozing into the soil. He can point to where the battles are fiercest the same way a person might know where the sun is, with their eyes closed – a conduction of heat and liveliness, an aura of red. The earth is greedy for violence; she soaks it up and revels in the lifeblood of the innocent the same way she spat him back out, screaming; a second delivery of filth and pity and endless, unanswered questions.</p><p>But, earth is more than just a witch. The washwoman had taught him that the world is also a mother: kind, protective and strong. Legs of towering trees, bosom above that is warm and lovely and safe, nourishment that grows when you plant it. He has learned that the witch-woman he’d known as a child is a mother; that mothers – moreso than fathers – are cruel in the softest of ways, and; that the earth has been his for a long time. Water to cleanse you can just as easily kill you. Birth is an anointment of blood and parasitic screaming. A cushion of earth <em> (your father put you in) </em> is still a grave.</p><p>Sometimes mothers hurt you. Sometimes bad people – <em> people </em> – choose to do good.</p><p>Jaskier chose – had made a vested effort for the past few centuries, in fact, to witness the world’s loveliest parts and the mother he’d never had: singing, parties, rainbows, laughter. Flowers. But he’s realizing that Jaskier is dying because flowers don’t last long anyway, even the weeds, and he has been around a very long time. He has nowhere else to float to: roots of creepers do not crawl very deep. People rip them out before they get the chance.</p><p>He has known elders, in his time; he’s watched them leave their lives in the final chapters of them to return to their homelands to die there, to acknowledge regrets and make peace with them. He doesn’t age, but Jaskier figures that’s what he’s meant to do now, here at the end of Jaskier’s life.</p><p>He would go to his birthplace, but it has been buried; unmarked, uncherished, forgotten only because the people were mercilessly bade to. His father’s own stain upon the thrice-poxed <em> family</em>. If his father’s house still stands, he will break it down with his bare hands. If there is a light, he will eat it. He will tear the bones off the hallowed walls and suck the marrow out himself. He will raze it the same way he was. He will <em> make </em>people forget it ever existed, just like his father’s filth son.</p><p>… That is why he does not go. He doesn’t want to unearth who he’d been born to be.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       5: neglect</b>
</p><p>Traveling didn’t used to be so lonely. He hadn’t had anyone to long for before the witcher (just dreams. Just could-have-beens).</p><p>Surprising for a man like Jaskier, he knows. He has spent a long time perfecting the appearance of himself: lovely bright sunshine child who cries when he is sad and laughs when he is happy (oh, but he is always happy). Who knows nothing of war, or heartbreak, or what it is to crawl. Who is harmless but still has petty enemies; who is a boon for bounties of joy, but not the greatest player of them all (just thinks he is). He had everyone, if only for a minute so no one would remember him, and therefor he missed no one.</p><p>Well – except the washerwoman, the one he remembered through his palms like a reverse fortune-teller. She had picked him up, a washed-out seedling who’d uprooted himself from a pit of bones, and had planted him in her chest. He thinks she loved him –<em> he </em>certainly did. He hadn’t known what it was at the time: akin to the brass of loyalty, but softer, rounder, like a rose.</p><p>Love sounded like bells.</p><p>The day she’d died – peacefully, hands in repose, soft smile on her dead lips – he’d left (for she lived alone and penniless at the edge of the world) singing with new chiming chords of a love lost. <em> There’s no sunshine when she’s gone </em> , he’d warbled at the birds as he’d headed for the coast, trying out Jaskier instead of Dandelion. Jaskier sang sad songs, too. <em> Only darkness every day…</em></p><p>He had forgotten what loss felt like.</p><p>The ache in his breast had weaned, eventually, helped along by the marvels of the world. Nilfgaard was a bright land, people of the sun, and yet the other kingdoms somehow outshined it. He had played for everyone: peasant and king, woman and child. His sounds (sometimes tasteful, often not) had graced the halls of mighty keeps built into the rock, of fields where sweethearts’ weddings were witnessed, of commandeered Elvish towers, of many a princess’s crib in the high chambers of the queens of Cintra.</p><p>Flighty, like a lark, he never stayed long – always places to see, people to marvel, friends to love and then ensure they forget him.</p><p>He travelled north. Always north. South had only held a sandy grave and a dead garden.</p><p>Until Geralt, of course. Until he’d been shocked into silence by a stone-faced critique. Until he realized he’d only been seeing the world in light, ignoring the shadows.</p><p>(Shamefully, he’d always felt at home in the overshadows. He knew them too well).</p><p>Three words. Just three, voiced from a gravelly chest peppered with scars, and he’d been hooked – like a common fish, just like everyone else who met him, Jaskier was gone – and he’d followed that man into the unknown.</p><p>Now, as the lute on his shoulder grew heavier than the pit in his chest and the sun fattened, ever-brighter every day, Jaskier wished he’d stayed away from the darkest pits the witcher made his living in (genocide of the elves, corruption so deep royal babes were born with rot, misery and starvation and poverty that is necessary for the system to continue—)</p><p>Because now – now, he was heading back south.</p><p>He sang but once before he sold his lute: to a blonde child in a blue bonnet, wreathed in dirt and whimpering like the hums of a churchyard, alone in a ditch – a ripple of the flowing refugees. Before another family who’d lost their child to war had claimed her, she had clung to him with stringy-strong limbs as they soothed each other through their tears;</p><p>
  <em> There’s no sunshine when he’s gone. It’s not warm when he’s away... There’s no sunshine when he’s gone, and he’s always gone too long anytime he goes away… </em>
</p><p>He goes south.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       6: the sticking lesson</b>
</p><p>As he trudges through Temeria, giving what little he has left to the sallow-faced outcasts heading to the edge of the world (war is pulsing ever closer and he can feel it like a heartbeat under his shoes), Jaskier loses himself to memory. It is his custom, when he must shed himself. He likes to remember who he’d been.</p><p>He begins at the beginning: cornflower blue skies, golden fields of cascading earth, and a lifeless keep he was kept in. Here, Juliański was born.</p><p>He thinks his father’s lessons – the ones he remembers, the ones he cannot forget – were supposed to be taken metaphorically.</p><p>(He has a deep and abiding respect for metaphors now.</p><p> It is his trade; it is his art; it is his definition.)</p><p>He remembers the lesson that started his end. On a fresh, pure spring morning, flowers mercilessly stamped out by the heat of the glorious sun, which sounded like cicadas (heavy, oppressive, primordial); his blissfully alive brothers sneering at his frail, pale body; a frown on his father’s stone face that would never change. He learned that pain was supposed to be a deterrent. Pain was meant to stop, or at least slow you down. Pain was an oppressor.</p><p>One of his brothers – the firstborn, the glory child, the one who bested him at everything and <em> never </em> let him forget it – had come along to gloat at Jaskier’s failure. (He’d been Juliański then, but the name had never fit. It was too sibilant, too confining, not his; like a filched necklace that choked him for daring to think he was worthy of bearing such beauty. It wasn't even a forename). The firstborn wasn’t unique in his victories, only boastful. The other three brothers had also thrashed Juliański at everything their father threw at them, each in varying stages of success. All were made to compete against the other. All had met success. All had been better at coaxing the rare compliment from father than the spurious little bastard who could only scratch out a draw, never a win, against his betters.</p><p>Father had stopped bringing the completed set of his sons to watch Juliański; there were no more lessons left to learn about failure. Success, though, got you private viewings of the youngest, the half-born’s defeat. It must’ve been the eldest son’s chief pleasure in life, as he never missed a chance to smear his half-brother’s head into the dirt.</p><p>That day, father had pitted his second-born against his bastard. He thinks he remembers his oldest brother snickering and eating candied nuts. He remembers it had filled him with rage.</p><p>But, pain; Jaskier’s teacher. The lesson that had stuck. It had gone something like this:</p><p>Amongst the dunes – because they were desert-children <em> first </em> – the second born had started a fight. Scrappy, fever-desperate for approval from father that was <em> always </em> stolen by the firstborn, Jaskier had danced around the bigger body, lithe and untouchable and an obvious contrast to the mountain furiously trying to make him bend. Jaskier never won – not against the might of his bigger, better-born brothers who ate the thickest cuts of meat and wanted for nothing – but he rarely lost, often forcing his siblings to concede under the condemned gaze of their patriarch.</p><p>Conceit was something his father never accepted, but emulated. Surrender was less palatable than death. Death was glory (death was <em> absence </em> – deafening, to Jaskier. Terrifying in ways his bloodline never seemed to grasp).</p><p>Today, Juliański kills his brother. He will never be the same.</p><p>Sand had snagged the second-born’s calve, soaking it into a morass Juliański had tagged upon their arrival. Murderously torpid, heaving like a bull because that had been a <em> rookie </em> mistake and father was <em> watching</em>, the brother had stabbed the silver broadsword into Jaskier the way one might slaughter a beast –</p><p>but. Jaskier had felt the weight of father’s gaze on him, for a moment, because he’d <em> always </em>listened to his father’s lessons and had swallowed them down along with the blood and sweat they produced and he’d known his father missed nothing.</p><p>Jaskier had never forgotten the tutorial of terrain: <em> The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. </em>He knew when he was being tested.</p><p>Hunting the <em> miracle </em> of possible success with blood hissing from his bared teeth, Juliański had allowed his weapons to become extensions of himself and rained down hummingbird throes upon his kin’s flesh, ripping him open at the seams and wetting the greedy earth. Wretched, unarmed, moaning, his brother gave a feeble retaliation and something grabbed his shoulder, but Juliański had twisted, lobbed the soaked blade through a palm, and beat the body beneath him until second-born became a canvas and Juliański could <em> finally </em>see the art he was born to create.</p><p>Eventually, he’d stopped. He tells himself it was because his brother had gone silent – but he thinks it’s because he’d known his work was finished. Sagging into the sand, the body of his brother had been shiny in the sunlight: red and crimson and scarlet hues, bright like the proud Nilfgaard crest.</p><p>He’d won.</p><p>He’d beaten his brother – the pureblood, his better, one of the chosen sun-reapers of the world.</p><p>But no fanfare beheld him when he stood: a god in an empty arena. Cherry-red poured from Jaskier’s flesh, hot and bubbling, around a broadsword's blade lodged in his belly. <em>Such a</em><em> lovely color to paint</em> with, he remembers thinking dreamily;<em> why wasn’t he dying? </em> Juliański had failed to notice the raw laceration on his own body, cleaving his chest open as though it bore fruit – he’d felt no pain despite the cracked bones and bleeding flesh he could feel echoing in his chest, but…</p><p>… he couldn’t hear it. Anything. He couldn’t hear any of the music birthed from the world.</p><p>The sands had stung in the screaming silence, his heartbeat had flagged in his ribcage, trapped by the gazes of his kin left standing: the firstborn brother, much closer than last he’d looked, had blood squeezing through his fingers from a gash in his hand (<em>when had he…?); </em> the father, greedy, starving, insatiable, like Juliański had been a cabochon hiding in coal. Worthless, until he wasn’t. Discarded, until he was valued.</p><p>He’d been allowed to sit at the table that night. In the second-born’s spot, as he had failed to wake.</p><p>Juliański should have celebrated. Should have wept for finally receiving the acknowledgement his brothers got by simply breathing, by virtue of not murdering their secret whore-mothers during birth, by being a planned point in a pentacle, by passing through the loins of a noblewoman his father had squirted them into.</p><p>That day had been Juliański’s first honorable one, the beginning of his momentous rise as death-begot, the only time he could remember his father smiling because of his bastard son. It had also been the last time the second-born had spoken to him. While Jaskier had recovered from his mortal wound in a matter of days, his brother succumbed to infection in the same timeframe, blood more ooze than living with decay rotting the room.</p><p>Glory had tasted like ash in his mouth.</p><p>Eight months after his ascension, after his father learned he could take a direct hit from a broadsword-master’s steel and walk away, all of his brothers would be dead – shamefully, their bodies burned rather than buried – and Juliański would fail his final test. He would choose to abandon his prerogative, gifted to him by his latent power that had to be reaped from the deaths of his brothers, abandon his country, his homeland, the shattered remains of his family, his birthright - to reinvent himself as a flower.</p><p>Juliański’s future was death: screaming, endless. He would be reveled; he would be worshipped; he would be unforgivable.</p><p>It took a long time for Jaskier to stop hating himself. He’s still working on it.</p><p>Jaskier – now, <em> here: </em> is a poet. He wears weeds as a moniker because nobody ever assumes them to be worthy – small, forgettable annoyances that can disappear into the world and never be found by their fathers. He buries his power, abandons it, in Juliański’s sandy grave. It had been dug by his father to cement the doomed decision his son had made by refusing the last lesson.</p><p>But he’s never <em> wanted </em>his power, never thanked a god or even felt a shred of gratitude for it, until he finds the child surprise.</p><p>She is hidden in the fated forest, the one that smells like his old washerwoman, and she is caged in bones of steel and bade to heel under the sharpened blade of his countrymen (<em>what – what were those uniforms? How long has he been away?) </em> who stand like proud corpses, wreathed in black. There is a rope around her bared neck. There is hopelessness in her eyes.</p><p>There is no witcher.</p><p>Jaskier finds himself greeting the burn under his skin, the steel-song of weaponry, the release. The skill that murdered his brothers and ruined his life, the bane of his humanity (if he even has any) - he chooses to welcome it.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       7: power, coveted</b>
</p><p>… That was a lie.</p><p>Jaskier has craved power before.</p><p>But it is true that he has never wanted the <em> masculine </em> idea of power – he was born with it, (cursed with it), unknowingly devalued because of an assumed <em> absence </em> of it, but it is an abomination to him. He had cast it aside and had wreathed himself in sunlight; pretended that was who he’d always been.</p><p>He hates death; he dates the dying. There is nothing natural about a woman drowning in her own fluids, or a man eating himself from the inside out while kings feast above him, or a child gutted on a pike because of their birthplace.</p><p>(Or, perhaps.</p><p>Those things <em> were </em> natural. Things like him.</p><p>Perhaps what humans created –</p><p>happiness, children, windows, gardens, tenderness, love,</p><p><em> music </em> –</p><p>were the unnatural).</p><p>Jaskier loves beautiful things, loves people moreso, and revels in merrymaking of all kinds. He has never wanted anything more than the power to make people smile, faces curl like ferns, beam like the moon, sing like starlight.</p><p>(That is also a lie, but not the one we’re addressing.</p><p>Not yet.)</p><p>Kings, gods, witches, women – all have deemed themselves bereft of power; sought to seek it for themselves. Not Jaskier, the simple bard in love with life. At least, not until Yennefer.</p><p>He knows her before they’ve met. Even while he choked on blood he cannot die from, he recognized the child beneath it all (because nobody like them exists until they are forged). Underneath the shadowed and sultry body of a prime sorceress, he could see the girl hunching even further than her shoulder forced her spine to bend.</p><p>He – primally, instinctually, tragically – understands her chosen rebirth as Yennefer the fearless, the beautiful, the unclaimable. He recognizes the stains of the shit she’s waded through, marking her shoulders (where her head is always held high) with an invisible line. He is bizarrely proud, and he envies her.</p><p>Jaskier is a bard, and bards do not know of the pain of witches, of body-robbery, of rebirth, so he’d said nothing. If he had, Jaskier thinks he would’ve congratulated her on keeping the scars of her own hand. He wishes he had the option of erasing his own. He doesn’t know, if given the choice, he would have the strength to keep them.</p><p>For a moment, under the squeezing hand of the witcher (<em>who had seemed – at the time, he really thought that maybe Geralt might—</em>), Jaskier had worried Yennefer’s piercing purple eyes would see right through him and Know. That all his careful sculpting of weeds would have to be burned and started anew. That she would see his core of rot and myrrh and take Geralt away from him, leave him to writhe against the ecstasy in the room until they, too, perished. (Because he couldn’t. He’d tried – so many, many times – to perish).</p><p>But she didn’t. She’d only had eyes for Geralt, and who could blame her. What is a weed compared to a massif.</p><p>Her power is unfathomable and, when chained to a force like chaos: unpredictable. She’d birthed another force, the djinn, that had chosen oblivion than to remember circumstances of their existence and wasn’t that just irritatingly relatable; cured Jaskier of his superficial death wound; and then fucked Geralt all in a single night. Geralt went to her, willingly. Took the abuse she slung at him and gave her back more, more, more of what she doesn’t want.</p><p>Jaskier had watched them, for a moment, feeling the blood cool on his throat and wishing it had still poured. His hands had ached, but there had been no oil. Both eyes had stung, but he’d had no song. Instinctively, his hands had wrapped around the lute as though it were a weapon as he watched their bodies join. He whispered “piglet” as he left them to their coupling (and hates himself still for how she had flinched, instinct, the same way he flinches at bones. Hates himself for how he could see the hunched girl amidst the naked sorceress astride a witcher’s cock).</p><p>Juliański had always preferred daggers.</p><p>Yennefer of Vengerburg is one of the greatest witches to walk the land,  the kind that belched fire to prove a point, but that is not the power Jaskier coveted (in fact, he is worried he would wipe the floor with her if he trusted himself to be able to come back from that kind of woe. He never wants to use it again, not even to prove a point. He's not sure how deep that well does down).</p><p>Jennefer is <em> beautiful. </em> That is why he envies her.</p><p>Beauty, Jaskier knows, is a type of power; a capacity owned and distributed by women, bequeathed by foolish men who find it inferior and fall for it every time; a power often mistaken as weakness. Something Geralt had but didn't believe he did, didn't brandish it the way he would a sword. It is such a soft strength because it cannot make people bleed. It's a force he’s never had.</p><p>Jaskier is all smiles when the witch abandons Geralt and he struts back to the bard, a walk devoid of shame. He doesn’t even look at Jaskier. He knows damn well<em> why</em>, of course, and pretends knowledge is a shield; Jaskier is not beautiful and yet professes that he is. He is good at lying; he fools even witchers (sometimes). He should <em>thank</em> Yennefer for riding the witcher into the proverbial sunset, really, because Jaskier had been able to scrub out the pints of blood from his shirt before Geralt could notice the sheer amount he’d lost. He's a capitalist of a liar.</p><p>But gods, he wishes he were beautiful – or even just lovely, handsome, pretty. Perhaps Geralt might look at him, then. Perhaps someone would finally wish to stay after a thousand nights of conjoined bodies, taking again and again and never, ever choosing him. Perhaps he would be enough.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       8: pride of</b>
</p><p>The weak moonlight shines on the child surprise’s filthy hair and she looks so much like the witcher that Jaskier’s heart lurches in its boned cage. <em> (But, where is he?) </em></p><p>He remembers Queen Calanthe as a child: tall, toothy, and dangerously bold. The Princess isn’t too different. The cub is very much a lion, even in pain, even amongst death – no, in <em> spite </em> of it – and the pride of this matriarchy is undying, the fight that burns in their queens’ eyes stoked and kindled as babes.</p><p>Jaskier had played often for the queen, practicing his “entertaining but unremarkable” persona. He’d waggishly perform and inspire and then melt into the shadows of the event: he preferred to let his music rest in people’s minds, not himself. Calanthe had always seemed to know him, though, no matter how dressily he wore his frocks to distract from the plainness of his face. Her eyes had always found his at the name day feasts he’d swindle into, and she’d nod – sweaty and wounded and seated, a queen with bloodstains in her hair.</p><p>He had played for both Calanthe’s cubs, Pavetta <em> and </em> the Child Surprise – and he had never told Geralt because he is ugly and a liar. He had dared to rename himself a third time and called himself Dandelion to tease a giggle from Pavetta. Years later, a similar smile bloomed from Pavetta’s orphaned, not-yet-queen.</p><p>The point is: the Cintran queens have always seemed to know him. He thinks the same uncanny recognition of the name-day-bard that Calanthe, Pavetta, <em> and </em> Cirilla is what sparks in Ciri’s eyes.</p><p>She looks right at him, hidden in the trees like a creature, directly like she'd had a map. Jaskier knows he is well-hidden because he will <em> never </em> forget his father’s terrain lesson. He is horrified. He doesn’t want anyone to see him – to <em> know </em> him – like this.</p><p>In the gloom of the fated forest she finds herself in, still caged by dark men, Ciri says nothing; she doesn’t stare at Jaskier after that first glance and keeps him a mystery to her prison sentinels. She is still, a rock that breaks the swelling tides of black-clad soldiers, tied to a tree by the neck like a suckling pig. They take turns mocking her, ignoring her, and shiftily looking at each other as they adjust themselves in their soot-ash tunics.</p><p>Fury chokes him. He is ashamed at Juliański’s countrymen – at <em> his </em> countrymen.  Where were the banners of gold? Where were the fiery, contemptuous warriors who treated the defeated with honor, respect? Why the <em> fuck </em> were they even this far north? What did desert-children want with tundra or swamps or mountains or someone else’s child?</p><p>
  <em> (Where is he?) </em>
</p><p>He cannot wait for the witcher, but Jaskier must yet linger – he cannot risk Ciri’s safety.</p><p>Jaskier hides in the canopies of the dying forest they have trampled to reach her, their stolen child surprise, and waits like a spider. He has never forgotten the lesson on terrain. The moon is dim, the night cool; the sudden rain slowly fritzing into the air with soft <em> puffs </em> and <em> hisses, </em>and soon they will never see him coming. He has already chosen his first target – a boor of a man, swaggering with drink away from his sons of the soil to piss in someone else’s.</p><p>There are daggers strapped to the man’s belt.</p><p>Jaskier readies the sapling in his palms, stripped and springy and <em> just </em> the right length to soak the air from a man’s lungs, and drops.</p><p>
  <em> (Where is Geralt?)</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       9: Blight</b>
</p><p>The light is not Jaskier’s birthright, but he wants it.</p><p>Despite being of the desert, he was never suited for it; burned easily, forced to squint under the sun’s splendor. Light was unkind to him. Not even candles had not been lit for his parturition, as is custom to guide the way for the soul of the new life,</p><p>(second-born had often sneered</p><p><em> you don’t have a soul, bastard </em> –</p><p>he hopes he was ill-judged</p><p>but finds himself alone, abandoned too often to believe the sour note)</p><p>nor had there been a circle of women to hum and sing and dragoon his mother through the contractions. She had been left to birth him alone, in the chapel of bones where she’d worshipped, smuggled in by the sympathetic washwoman who knew of his father’s gruesome tastes. At least there had been fewer rats than in the alley. Cold stone was his crib, corpse-shrouds his swaddling. Above his crowning head read <em> Exsurge a mortuis. (rise from the dead </em>).</p><p>He doesn’t know if his mother had ever held him with warm arms (he’d been found by the staff, silently nursing on her dead fingers). He only knows what he’s been told: he is a monster who killed his bearer but is valued for the blood that pumps in his veins. Pancratz were conquerors, descendants of the gods, warriors until they fell. Even a half-blood would make a monumental solider; thus, he’d been summarily harvested from a corpse’s arms to fuel the empire.</p><p>Jaskier had left it behind. He’d buried Juliański and that life. He had <em> died</em>, just like father wanted.</p><p>He hides the strangled boorish man’s body in a copse, an unnecessary caution because the fog (which murmurs softly to him, <em>hush</em>, <em>shh; quietly now</em>) was slowly billowing into the clearing of enlisted men. The blades he’d reaped would do, but he hefts a broken spear from an ashen body of his countryman – the soldier must’ve died from sickness; they hadn’t bothered to bury his body in this swampy place – as a third.</p><p>He checks the moon, almost harshly solid in the sky. Not quite yet. Just a little longer.</p><p>Jaskier counts out the ballad he’d written for Geralt and Yennefer (and himself), his final composition, the one he’d never played to an audience larger than his grief. It has an eight-count measure in it, hidden there so he could breathe through the words should he ever perform it. He inhales, counting; allows himself to detach from his body.</p><p><em> It is the unemotional, reserved, calm, detached warrior who wins, not the hothead</em>, says his father as Juliański bleeds on the floor. There is still dirt under his father’s nails from his firstborn’s burial.</p><p>It is time.</p><p>He supposes the torches of the doomed battalion will suffice for candles. The dead will need them to guide the way out.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       10: war</b>
</p><p>Battlefields buzz – it’s always what war has sounded like, to him.</p><p>Like a thousand flies crawled into his ears and began to hum. Like a hundred drummers accompanied his steel-song, drowning it. Like the earth had cracked itself open and an ear-splitting drone had emerged from its belly, whispering foul shit into his ears and his mouth and his body until he cannot think anymore because</p><p>it</p><p>is</p><p>too</p><p>
  <em> loud. </em>
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</p><p>War is deafening.</p><p>Death is silence.</p><p>The combination renders you mute.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <b>       11: wither</b>
</p><p>Jaskier knows he cannot die – too many have already proven its futility to him, the first being his family – but he knows of a sort of trance that is available to him. It isn’t much, but it’s always been an option rooted in the back of his mind when the hunger pangs cripple him but he does not starve; or when the ghouls follow him at night because they recognize him as kin and Jaskier shakes because of how terrible it was to crawl out of a grave, gods he’s sorry he cannot help them; he’s so sorry, he’s so scared but he knows it hurts <em> so much </em>—</p><p>He thinks he should like to become a tree.</p><p>Just fold himself around a sapling and lend his blood to its growth and watch the world go by. He warms to the idea of towering trustworthily, to offer shelter, to bask under the sun and share a lifespan with a magnificent earthy creation and witness human ingenuity a thousand years from now, where he could remain himself.</p><p>He knows he cannot. His blood is craven, rejected by the earth. Nothing grows on old battlefields and he was molded to be a living arena of war. He <em> knows </em> the act would be futile.</p><p>The princess’s face – open, horrific, ashen, surrounded by a sea of soldier’s bodies he put there – makes him want to try, anyway.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. part 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Exeunt Ciri. Enter: the ladies of the wood.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>(revised, along with part 1, on 02/21/21)</p><p>Well hello, fellow hunkerdowners! (to steal a line from the indefatigable Leslie Jordan plz look up his Instagram it’s SELF. CARE.)</p><p>So, as usual, this lil’ bag of vignettes got way bigger in my head when I started replaying the damn game and forgot how spooky the Witcher world is, really. The show dabbles a bit in absurdity (which is why it works no lie) but like – shit’s dark as hell. So guess who added more dark stuff to her already dark af story—</p><p>I’m so sorry it’s not finished yet but I wanted to send more of it into the world and see what sticks (also to help motivate me to pick a damn ending)</p><p>YES THERE WILL BE ROMANCE I PROMISE IT’S JUST TAKING A MINUTE.</p><p>Thank you so much for your lovely comments and kudos!! I have less community because haha plague so like, y’all, I cry a little bit every time. ;__;</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      12: dandelion</strong>
</p><p>He doesn’t know what to say.</p><p>He is dripping with the blood of his countrymen, shamed in their sooty-black uniforms. Black: a color that would mortify the goddess, whom defines their country of the <em>sun</em>—he feels like he is exhaling cold ash into the still air, his breaths thick and weak because air somehow ceases in the presence of an inhumation, and Cirilla cannot look away from him. She is frozen like a rabbit, like an ensnared and helpless creature in the wet green.</p><p>This, more than anything, prompts Jaskier to move. No child of Calanthe should cower.</p><p>He goes to her, careful to avoid stepping on the fresh corpses that litter the earth. This, he knows: the dead are lonely... and the necrophages rotting from the last battle four years ago stir beneath them, fingertips scratching at the earth. He has to get the princess out; he wasn’t sure if a starving undead army would obey him. They crave human flesh, of which there was plenty now – the cooling corpses steamed in the cold night air – but fresh, living meat is always the sweetest.</p><p>It is hard to reason with beasts, Jaskier thinks as he reaches out to touch her and then remembers himself; stops.</p><p>Cirilla looks at him. She trembles, her malnourished body thrumming in the midst of a known predator, but she meets his gaze because that is who she is. Her neck has been rubbed raw from the rope noosing it but her hands are free.</p><p>He takes a dagger; wipes it on his (ruined) wet sleeve, and slowly offers it to her with the blade stinging his palm. No queen needs assistance in freeing herself from her bonds – a lesson he’d learned from her grandmother.</p><p>She doesn’t take it; looks at him first, wide eyes (magic, touched by the old magic, <em>so</em> like Geralt it robs him of air) confused and wary and exhausted.</p><p>The faintest rumble beneath them snags his attention, quickens his heartbeat. He can hear bones rattling underground, gnashing teeth thirsty to fill half-eaten stomachs. They – still human but had forgotten it with the wastes of death (he had to think of them as human, he <em>had</em> to, because if he didn’t—) were rousing, the raw kills spurring their awareness.</p><p>She has to leave. She <em>has</em> to get to Geralt. She will never trust him enough to escort her. <em>Geralt </em>wouldn’t—didn’t—trust him. And why would he? He should be hunted down like the rest of the beasts witchers slay, since he cannot do it himself.</p><p>(It is what he is owed).</p><p>But she stares and doesn’t take the dagger and there is no time.</p><p>“Flee, princess,” Jaskier says. He feels sticky-wet blood dry on his face, can taste speckles of it on his lips. It’s not his. “Before they get back up.”</p><p>She doesn’t. She is still staring at his bloody face. Then, after a shiver that jerked her whole body as though she were a marionette, and sounding so painfully lost, “Aren’t – a-aren’t you my birthday bard?”</p><p>Nobody had ever remembered him until Queen Calanthe. She’d been too damn clever not to notice a young man who never aged at her birthday fêtes. He had figured it was his death knell, a Cintran queen ending the line of murderous Pankratz for good. Yet every year in the late spring, no matter where in the northern kingdoms he’d been, Jaskier had received an embossed invitation to perform at first Pavetta’s, then Ciri’s nameday celebrations – always a lovely affair with fresh flowers, food and drink and, above all, exultations of love. Ciri had been blessed both with a parentage love story for the ages <em>and </em>with a birthday on Belletyn, the festival of rebirth. <em>You shall be her birthday bard</em>, Calanthe had told him once on Ciri’s third Nameday, <em>as you were mine and my daughter’s.</em></p><p>Now Ciri, in her tattered blue cloak, takes a step closer; she is chiming of hope with the softest of sour subharmonics hidden inside of it. For a moment, the sound overwhelms the ringing of the damned beneath them, and Jaskier tastes bitter sour pulp on his tongue. “Dandelion?” she whispers – and squints, as though he’s out of focus.</p><p>Jaskier exhales, which sounds dangerously close to a cry, and sees the child she’d been in her ragged face – a sweet baby who bounced and danced and did <em>not</em> brush her hair and had been generally allowed to behave like a vagabond because her grandmother loved her so much. She’d always worn a bright blue dress (<em>it’s my favorite color</em> she’d whispered to him once when he’d complimented her matching buttons) and had always, <em>always</em> asked him for more songs, to dance with her, to help make her mama a flower crown, to gift her another nickname.</p><p>She sounds so hopeful to see a friend. He wishes he could keep her safe, wishes he could be a good person and take her away from graveyards. But the dead were waking up and there was no time and she <em>has to find Geralt.</em></p><p>“Go, bluebird,” Jaskier whispered one of his childish names for her as a corpse blinked behind Ciri, dead eyes fixed on her body. He gestured with the dagger, “I’ll stop them from following.”</p><p>The sour note gets louder as she flinches from him. “… But—”</p><p>“<em>Please</em>, Ciri,” Jaskier says and hates himself. “You can’t stay here; keep moving. You must find Geralt.”</p><p>Her eyes are wet as she snatches the dagger from his hand (leaving a slice that sheds his own blood for the first time this night), cuts herself loose from the noose, and runs with the knife held tightly in her bloodless fingers. A soldier’s splayed legs trip her but Jaskier doesn’t move as she hits the ground, muffling a grunt into the dead man’s chest, before picking herself back up again. He doesn’t allow himself to follow – forces his senses on the blood caking his forearms and the buzzing hiss of the battle, quieting now that he is the only one left standing.</p><p>The bodies have stopped cooling. The ground stinks of iron, of gnawing hunger that cannot be slaked. The moon has predictably shut her eyes against such violence and it is now dark. Jaskier cannot control the trembling in his hands and tries to continue breathing through the burgeoning panic.</p><p>It's time.</p><p>The ichor that drips from his palm hits the ground in a steady rhythm, as though politely knocking at the door of the underworld. Jaskier waits in the copse of corpses, hearing fingers scratch from under the earth in response to his <em>drip-drip-</em>tapping, asking to be let back in. The shivers threaten to overtake his body, mini quakes that his sire would have beaten him dearly for. He wishes someone was there - anyone, anyone alive - so he wouldn't be so utterly alone.</p><p>But there is no one.</p><p>Jaskier breathes as a dead soldier groans near his feet. He must now focus on the present, drawing in deep breaths that coat his tongue in iron, because he has avoided this power for most of his life – the last time the undead were beneath him had been the day Juliański had died.</p><p>A finger emerges from the dirt, knucklebone cracked. The nail is heavy with fungus. A mealy yellow skull follows suit with a dried-out eye hanging limply from its head, easily confused with the worms squirming in its eye sockets. More and more dead men rose, bloated and foul and wasting away in their decay. Their teeth are bared and hissing as they smell fresh flesh to feed upon.</p><p>Jaskier swallows the bile hovering in his guts, contains his shakes, and stares them down. He will make sure none of them follow. He can do this much.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      13: heir</strong>
</p><p>The first time he’d met the witcher, Jaskier had been badly performing for bread in stolen Elvish towers (because starvation wouldn’t kill him but Melitele’s <em>tits</em> did it hurt to feel his body eat itself from the inside). He had been a good enough player to empty everyone’s pockets and even redefine their experience with music as a whole, but he’d also been old enough to know that fame hurts an immortal man’s reputation of being <em>able</em> to die if one never <em>ages. </em></p><p>(Jaskier had discovered, during his time bandying about the north, the art of being snippy.</p><p>He found it gratifying – pleasurable, even – to rile up other, stronger men and best them in battle with mere words.</p><p><em>Words</em>. Discourse,</p><p>even when shouted,</p><p>never sounded like buzzing in his brain – it sounded more like wings flapping.</p><p>Like escalation. Like flight.)</p><p>On that particular day, Jaskier had been pelted with bread for a poor performance that had been <em>flawlessly</em> executed, if Jaskier were ever to be asked his opinion. The good patrons had even been kind-souled enough to reward him with dinner! He'd almost forgotten to wear a melancholic frown as he'd collected his sooty payment.</p><p>That's when he had spotted a man. A reviled person, as no other patrons felt the need to even politely acknowledge his presence, who exuded power from every pore. A <em>witcher, </em>who had been vainly trying to hide himself in a shadowy corner. He remembers being accosted by his father’s voice in his head that was so automatic he couldn’t silence it if he tried (oh, had he tried): <em>Convince your enemy that he will gain very little by attacking you; this will diminish his enthusiasm.</em></p><p>It was one of the lessons he’d failed most spectacularly at because of the circumstances of his birthmother, who had been, as he’d learned from the pursed lips of the abbot, “not of good stock.” Jaskier was a badly put-together puzzle of mismatched genetics: broad shoulders, but impossibly trim hips (a dancer’s); Big hands, but thin and agile fingers (a clockmaker’s); A mind for strategy, but a face better suited for a king’s court: apple-cheeked, angular chin, attractive face (a whore’s).</p><p>Juliański – the lone survivor of the pentagrammic brothers, the foretold one, sired by Alfred Pancratz – looked like a cheap courtesan. He was not the stuff of legends and dirges.</p><p>But, ye gods. What a <em>figure</em> the witcher was; what god-like features he had, as though carved from stone. Sometimes, when Jaskier had wormed his way into the witcher’s routines, he’d been caught looking a little too long at the angles of Geralt’s face. He couldn't help it. He couldn't stop himself from memorizing the way his body moved, from learning which emotions he bottled up so tightly in the creases on his face. Often in those moments – the stray hairs wildly framing his sweaty face as he caught his breath after slaying beasties; the way his muscles swam under his plain but sturdy clothes; the rare smile that robbed witnesses of reason – Jaskier wished he’d been a painter.</p><p>Jaskier has since come to the conclusion that Geralt was the son his father had always wanted. He certainly <em>looked</em> like the heralded death-begot Nilfgaard prayed <em>(hunts)</em> for; stronger than rock, hewn by the ancient, trained by the best. Feared and hated by anyone who does not understand him.</p><p>(Geralt is the man Jaskier thinks might actually kill him.</p><p>Just not – not intentionally, no.</p><p> Just by ridding the world of its monsters while being treated like one.</p><p> Just by enduring the shit people threw at him and emerging a better person.</p><p>Just by talking to his horse as though she were of equal standing.</p><p>Just by breathing, sometimes.)</p><p>But that’s not fair to Geralt, who is a kind and soft and <em>decent</em> man – and who has learned the world doesn’t want that from him and so hides it to survive.</p><p>The field of corpses is beginning to turn (and twitch).</p><p>The sickly-sweet smell of rot is a scent Jaskier has spent lifetimes avoiding, and yet. Here he is.</p><p>He thinks of Geralt (breathing in through his mouth as calmly as he can to avoid the panic he knows is coming) as he waits until Cirilla’s quicksteps fade, until he is surrounded by naught but the soft susurrations of the mist. Waits until he knows she is safely out of range of the undead before allowing all of them to rise; he can only suppress the hum of animation, as much of a facsimile of it as it is, for so long. It would be better to them to feed on the corpses than to allow Nilfgaard a battalion of haunted soldiers, anyway. He’d heard the <em>twang</em> and unnatural subharmonics of their sorcerers before – the ones who dared to dabble in the dark. He is well aware of what devastation looks like.</p><p>Jaskier releases the final hold he had on the dead clawing at their unmarked graves. He tries not to succumb to the sobs he desperately wants to release, his heart feeling like a blister in his chest, as they emerge.</p><p>The military force of ghouls crawl from their mass grave, most wearing scraps of their battle armor that did them no favors in death. As the feasting of flesh began (<em>ripping tearing gnawing gnashing</em>) Jaskier latched onto anything to distract himself: not exposed bone, not human teeth shredding a human arm – no, the felled banners these men had worn in life. How many could he recognize? He identified many flashes of the lion of Cintra through the gore, the once-green tunics of the elves still worn on their skeletal backs, and even more Nilfgaardians, their sallow black uniforms forgotten for the soft meat before them. The still-waking Nilfgaardian soldiers moaned as their bodies were eaten.</p><p>None paid him any attention; he was not theirs to feed upon.</p><p>He knew a witcher would have stopped them. Knew Geralt would recognize the putrid threat and neutralize it, even without a paying contract, because that was the Code. Somehow the world had managed to gift guardians to humans who hated, <em>detested,</em> them. Somehow those guardians would still do the just thing, the right thing, for the sake of a people who’d rather see them extinct.</p><p>Jaskier doesn’t stop them.</p><p>He stands, unmoored, as his body quakes little tremors he cannot stop even for the memory of his father’s whip that had stained his backside for his cowardice, as an army he controls eats people he’d slain.</p><p>Geralt had accepted what he was.</p><p>Jaskier, standing in a bone orchard of his own making while things that were probably his kin ate his kills, couldn’t.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      14: crenation</strong>
</p><p>The trees grow from old to ancient, the canopies starving the earth of light. Jaskier fears the dark, but it does not blind him. He has never needed light to see where he's going and what he is.</p><p>He walks after the moon has turned, after the bloated bodies had begun to slow in their feeding. The dead grow fat with their satisfied craving, even if there is meat left to be eaten, and they notice him. Invariably, they find him, even when he's buried in a child-sized coffin or in bed with a beautiful woman. This latest blood-spilling of his had been no different.</p><p>He tries to walk faster, as though he can outpace his past. It's coming. </p><p>The dead always want to touch him, lay their sallow hands upon his undying flesh and – bask. He doesn’t understand why – had sobbed the first time in abject terror of feeling cold dead flesh connect with his own. But they never hurt him. They just touch, softly, like a beggar would with a gold coin, like a widow would to her love’s gravestone. Like a mother would their firstborn.</p><p>He flees before they can, this time. They will stop following after a while, he knows, will slow and scatter and often lay back into the ground, and he cannot handle being touched right now he just—can’t.</p><p>He manages a steady stride for a solid hundred paces before the shaking rattles his bones so badly he crashes into a weeping willow’s trunk. His body seizes on itself. The blood on his skin is starting to itch badly enough that he cannot ignore it. It’s too loud again and he’s not even fighting, he’s—he can’t breathe.</p><p>He makes no noise (he is too well-trained for that) but huddles under the canopy of trees, fingernails clawing into the bark, as his mind is yanked from the present.</p><p>He is back. He is underground in the chapel of bones. He is about to become his father’s heir. All he has to do is slaughter another brother.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      15: the unluckiest </strong>
</p><p>Picking an absolute rock bottom point in Jaskier’s life was honestly difficult; he has so many to choose from and lifetimes spent gathering them. A few moments spring to mind as he dazedly thinks about it.</p><p>He is walking on blood-stained shoes through the forest of fed necrophages, sipping his breaths and biding his time before the panic clawing at his gut surfaces – he needs to put distance between himself and the battlefield or they’ll find him again. The melancholia gave him something to quip about and it had always helped distract Geralt from his poison-eyed potions.</p><p>Ah, but the worst day of his life. <em>Let’s see</em>, he hums to himself shakily. There was the first time he'd tried to commit suicide (and when he woke up after); perhaps the morning he’d realized the undead wanted to touch him, reverently, like he was their God (and the unhealable bites they’d left in his adoptive mother in her house at the edge of the world); and more recently, the day on a mountain that he’d realized he was in love.</p><p>But he knows, just like he knows where blood is spilt the heaviest, just like he can count how many dead souls are buried here, that it was the morning his father buried him alive.</p><p>He’d been cruel enough to do it in daylight. Juliański had been awake (and screaming, begging absolution from his father) when they’d shoveled the dirt atop his coffin. The casket had had cracks in the subprime wood that allowed a chip of sunlight. It had been <em>cruel </em>to give it to him in the first place.</p><p>He was the fifth son of five – same as the points in a star. He’d often wondered why his father hadn’t drowned his lone half-bred bastard in the river and fuck a fresh cunt full of another son. This, he now knows: the magic breaks if you add a sixth. And you must have five because four are required for ritual sacrifice. ‘Tis the unspoken Pancratz method of creating a god – one that, supposedly, had failed with every attempt except the first time they’d tried it.</p><p>Unintentionally, Juliański had killed three of his brothers in honest combat. All three of them had succumbed to their wounds. He, the slightest and having the weakest-blood of the Pancratz line, had somehow become father’s chosen. Only one son had the chance to ascend. He hadn't known about the ritual sacrifice until - well.</p><p>On the worst day of his life, Nilfgaard’s royalty had been informed that the holy ceremony would be performed and that an elite godsoldier, the death-begot, would be ready for deployment at the king’s pleasure. Father had been the previous attempt at a death-begot, and the most promising. He’d won Nilfgaard’s wars for a celebrated century before officially retiring to sire his heirs.</p><p>As though anyone, especially a living god, needed to <em>retire</em> to find spare time to fuck. <em>Unofficially</em>, he’d suffered a career-ending wound that proved his mortality and had been forcibly coerced into being little more than a prized breeding stallion by the Court.</p><p>Death-begots are not crippled by mortal wounds. Death-begots do not bleed like stuck pigs. His father’s first loss had been his final.</p><p>But, his day. <em>His </em>glorious day.</p><p>Juliański had been <em>elated</em>, the same way the beggar princesses in Jaskier’s tales were. He’d been dressed in fine silks and thick leather. He’d been allowed to bathe within the castle walls, attended to by expressionless ladies whose breathing sounded of muted-pitch-fear (<em>of whom? Of him?), </em>and father. Father had deigned to <em>touch</em> him, willingly, without administering pain: his shoulder, his hair. His face.</p><p><em>You are an instrument of war,</em> his father had said with Juliański’s cheek cupped in his palm. <em>My blood; my legacy. You are ready.</em></p><p>The final test was always witnessed by the old gods, in the chapel of bones where he was borne, under the waking of the sun. The trial was so secretive even the candidates were ignorant of what they were to accomplish. He had been bidden by the priests – who wore lesser skulls on their heads, never of the bloodline, always painted black so their eyes appeared to pop from the deep sockets – to walk down the stone steps of the crypt, alone. It’d been dark, had smelled musty with disuse. He remembers being so stupidly proud of himself, to have made it <em>this far</em> as a bastard, before he’d entered the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Chapel">boned chapel</a>.</p><p>There, waiting for him in the torchlight, had been the eldest brother.</p><p>He’d been hogtied, gagged, and had already suffered a beating; bruises had lined his face, blood along the floor. Hooded and cloaked priests both held his head back by his hair, ripping it at the roots for how he’d struggled, and forced him to kneel in the center of the bones. His chest had sounded like bellows and he’d been frothing at the mouth; his eyes, white and wild, fixed on Juliański.</p><p>He’d frozen – the priests had assaulted a Pancratz heir: this was heresy.</p><p>But his father, tall and slick and eyes beetle-black in the light, had melted from the shadows to gesture at his eldest with a stark-white hand that painfully resembled the skeletons lining the walls. He wore a skull of his own son (second-born, Jaskier has guessed) upon his crown. Father had not seemed worried or upset that his firstborn had been trussed up like a pig to slaughter. It hadn't seemed fair to handicap the eldest for a trial of death. Juliański had been slow, always so gods-damned <em>slow,</em> to pick up that that had been the point.</p><p><em>Kill it</em>, his sire had ordered. <em>Kill the worthless seed, equip his head to your face, and inherit your destiny.</em></p><p>(Jaskier understands Geralt’s abhorrence of destiny, he really does.)</p><p>Juliański’s refusal had been his death warrant. He had been taught war, not murder.</p><p>He thinks now, <em>how fucking naïve</em>.</p><p>Jaskier has thought a lot about that moment. He has concluded that the family – the priests, the court, the father – had reacted so severely not because of his disobedience, but because they’d feared that he couldn’t be controlled. He thinks, now, after putting down one army and summoning another from the grave, that they had been right to be afraid.</p><p>Amongst the bones, as soon as the word <em>no</em> had left his lips, priests had dissolved from the walls – blending into the bones that lined the crypt with their haunting faces – as his father sentenced him to die.</p><p>He should have resisted. He <em>wished</em> he’d fought. He’d been too shocked because they'd sliced open his brother's neck and let him bleed on the bones. He couldn't look away as his eldest brother shit himself as he died, crying, while no one did anything to ease his passing.</p><p>The priests, his foster-mother, his father, all of them had beaten Juliański for his weakness, for his insubordination to crest, king, and country. He's not sure how long they tortured him, but eventually he was put in a box. They had tied his hands when finished, terrified that a dead man would wake and crawl to the surface.They even gagged him, too, when his cries for his father grew to shrieks and screams for forgiveness. Disoriented, he remembers the heavy <em>thud</em> - the final note in a song - of an iron lid shutting his casket; impossible to open from the inside. </p><p>Then, they’d buried him – wearing no crown of bone like his forebears. Death in shame.</p><p>Panic – raw, cloying and white– clouds his memory, but sensation has kept it fresh all these years. He cannot forget the feelings of, when the coffin had given way because the iron lid had been too heavy to bare; dirt clogging his airway; pure grit in the soft parts of his eyes; and how tears and snot had mixed everything into mud. He couldn’t <em>breathe</em> everything hurt he couldn’t <em>see;</em> <em>why would they <strong>do</strong> this to him?</em></p><p>This is what he remembers (and tries to forget): a raw animal instinct to survive. For hours, days, <em>lifetimes,</em> he’d thrashed; he’d kicked; he’d muffled out screams until something gave way – his sarcophagus, splintering under his naked heel, and then blood had mixed until he was drowning in a graveyard.</p><p>He doesn’t think he would have made it to the surface – would’ve continued to drown, lungs exploding and healing only to rupture again, in earth and mucus and tears for <em>years</em> until the coffin eroded enough to escape it.</p><p>But the dead are lonely.</p><p>This is all he can recall, from what little remained of his mind: cold fingers, white bone, reaching into his grave and misaligning the wood until it gave; tugging on his ruined body until he came out of the box his father had put him in; pushing him to the surface – gently, like a babe learning to swim – until he broke through the topsoil and purged himself of gravedirt until he was human again.</p><p>Maybe two moon-turns after that, the old washerwoman found him hiding in a tree, hundreds of miles from his birthplace, because the corpses who’d pushed him back to the living had doggedly followed him and he <em>hated</em> being touched by the dead. She’d chased them away with some old meat, coaxed him down, tucked him into her breast, and became his family.</p><p>Eventually, they had followed him to her house, too.</p><p>It is where he learned that the dead will stop listening to him.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      16: the cascade</strong>
</p><p>Jaskier wakes underneath a willow tree.</p><p>His body feels like it belongs to the oldest man in the world. He cannot feel his toes in their frozen wet shoes; his fingers are slowly trickling blood from the splinters jabbed into his nailbeds; all he can taste is dry coppery blood and he wishes he’d never been born – but he wakes.</p><p>The child surprise is gone. The dead did not follow him.</p><p>Despite his achievements, Jaskier has never felt quite so alone.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      17: the ladies of the wood</strong>
</p><p>Jaskier isn’t sure where to go or what to do or who to be or how to stand when he hears the clanging crashing-pot sound of pure, unadulterated panic sounding off in the distance.</p><p>It’s not an uncommon tune to hear these days, what with war and pestilence and a distinct lack of witchers policing the monsters humans make, but it is singular because it is <em>loud. </em>There can’t be anyone (alive) in this swamp-forest for miles, but for the sound to carry this far – Jaskier doesn’t know what to make of it. Even a mother-dragon’s death throes were softer than this caterwauling.</p><p>He cannot move. He is still buried underground, still trapped in his memories.</p><p>Has <em>has</em> to move.</p><p>He forces his aching limbs to budge. He rises – slowly, not unlike a vampire he’d seen Geralt hunt once – a single twisting motion of his spine because he is so tired, but the distress was so loud that ignoring it would be unthinkable.</p><p>For the second time that evening, Jaskier does not go south.</p><p>He follows the wail-song that sounds a bit like crackling fire and glee, now – stumbling through the thickening fog and tall trees festooned in wet, grassy ivy, idly working the wood-chips from his wet and bloody skin. He touches the old trees gnarled bark as he passes, thanking them quietly with a blessing he cannot give. He prays to gods he doesn’t believe in that the dead stay down – until the panic-sound clangs and whinges and thumps out a dirge-beat not unlike the witcher’s heart rate: Slow. Steady. Ominous, if you happen to be a beast—</p><p>Something lightly caresses his shoulder.</p><p>Jaskier is an exposed nerve; he is running on instinct. His last dagger is in his palm as though he’d summoned it there. His stance is wide to plant a charge. His guts are clenched for an incoming attack, where where are they—</p><p>It was an ear that had brushed against him.</p><p>A <em>human</em> ear, swinging from a tree.</p><p>He looks closer. It’s a garland of ears dangling from ill-made string, noosed around a dying tree limb. As Jaskier calms his flagging heartbeat, matching the throb of panic getting louder and louder from the mists, he is accosted by tens – no, <em>hundreds</em> of gorish strings festooning the forest canopy that he’d mistaken for vines. They varied in age – some closer to dust than flesh, others still scabbing from the removal slice.</p><p>He thinks, as the crackle-sounds accompanying the anxious thrum turn more... human-like, that this is <em>odd. </em>Even for a (discharged) witcher-companion’s standards. What on Melitele’s good green earth would pick trophies like this? And so many, for so long? Monsters <em>eat</em> their prizes, and these didn’t have any bitemarks; humans were more interested in scalped elvish ears than their own rounded appendages, and – Jaskier squinted into the canopy, it was getting much harder to see – so many looked too small for a full-grown adult’s so they had to be<em>—</em></p><p>Oh.</p><p>Oh, no.</p><p>The wet wind waved the strings of human offerings like sick windchimes and Jaskier remembered from whom the old washerwoman who’d raised him had escaped.</p><p>Cackling sounded off, deep in the misty forest, and a gloom settled over Jaskier when he realized who’s panic he’d been hearing. This had been the direction Cirilla had fled, hadn't it? These woods only wanted the sweetest of beings, the smallest humankind had to offer.</p><p>This was the <em>ladies’</em> wood.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      18: <strike>the luckiest </strike></strong>
</p><p>He tries to remember something good as his body, strung up tight as a lutestring, shakily walks towards the ladies’ shack he <em>knows</em> sits dead center of the woods. He cannot be in despair when meeting them – he’d give himself away, for it is not for the ladies’ Benevolence to show anything other than cocksure aggression and bloodlust.</p><p>He’s quite sure that his father and the witches (waiting for him with Ciri as their next meal) would have got on like a house on fire. Maybe he should find a skull to wear as a hat and <em>really </em>sell the show.</p><p>Calm, calm; he’s calm</p><p>(<em>where the fuck is Geralt</em>—)</p><p>he can think of candyfloss he’d steal from the chimneys of sweet shops and the honeysuckle that had grown on his washerwoman’s house like flies on shit. He’d <em>loved </em>that shack – had found many happy memories there, amongst the poverty. The bard had learned his trade from the old woman’s storytelling.</p><p>
  <em>Would you like to hear a story about a witch, little lark? No? Well, how about three of them?</em>
</p><p>The air is thick – soupy, chunks floating in it; difficult to breathe freely. The ornaments of ears were getting too numerous and too thick to avoid. Jaskier focused on the air entering his lungs as they slid across his face, leaving wet trails on his neck; he swallowed, exhaled, and repeated.</p><p>Other nice and lovely days, yes, excellent. Well, there’d been the day he’d first discovered a lute: Daphne (for all instruments, like boats, are women) had served him well enough through the ages. He’d found her on a corpse of a once-bard, forgotten on the side of the road, who had just handed it to him with a vacant smile before trying to get up and touch his face. Daphne – his first love – had been a fickle thing, for the double-g string and had bucked it off every chance she’d gotten, much like Roach.</p><p>He steps in a puddle he cannot see and misses that stupid, ornery old mare. So like her master – so damnably lovable, despite the waspish disposition. So proud, in spite of the world that deemed them unworthy.</p><p>His thoughts, inevitably, then turn to Geralt. Some of the best parts of Jaskier’s long life had been spent with the prickly witcher. There had been the grand adventures that he’d shared with everyone on the continent with his songs – as the Elvish king’s prisoners, as the performer to the double-Child Surprise banquet of Queen Calanthe’s court, as the – well perhaps not the djinn. But the memories Jaskier turns to on his march towards cannibalistic witch-monsters were the small moments, the ones nobody else would bother to put to memory.</p><p>It's quiet but for the whine of silence ringing in his head. Nothing feels alive here.</p><p>Jaskier braces himself on the mossy side of a tree to peek around the side. He is relieved and deeply unsettled to see a cabin best suited in a nightmare, eerily quiet now that the cackles had stopped – not the pulsing beat of panic, though, which was coming directly from the dilapidated structure. He knows this place, from the stories. He recognizes the smell (decay, festering rot) from his washerwoman’s hair – the smell she could never quite scrub out.</p><p>He – he didn’t know what he’d expected, from his foster-mother’s stories, but his heart seized as it had the day in the bone chapel where his life had ended.</p><p>He gives himself a moment to hide behind the tree and breathe into his knees, crouched low like a child. He can do this, he can, he just – gods, he needs a minute, he needs <em>air.</em></p><p>He winds bleeding fingers through his dirty hair and thinks of the time they’d been forced to sleep under the stars due to the presence of an angry mob of villagers who’d hired Geralt for his services. Once rendered, Geralt’s already tenuous welcome had run dry. The witcher had never let on, but Jaskier had always known by the soft hollow chords that had rung from his chest that he’d been affected by the shit treatment.</p><p>Jaskier had been hemming and hawing through meaningless platitudes of <em>how nasty those townspeople were, gnashgabby swines the lot of them; mother earth probably gave better accommodations than those cockheads ever would</em>, with little success. The witcher hadn’t even grunted out his normal replies as he’d tended to a small fire between them; risking anything larger would only invite the human hoards.</p><p>(Jaskier sometimes thinks humans might need the monsters so they don't see themselves as the same.)</p><p>Amidst his attempted cheering of the witcher, Roach had been dissatisfied with the pickings of grass for her dinner and had nibbled on his hair (the <em>horrid</em> beast, supping on his scalp like a bloody worm). His outraged flails had only made her clamp down all the harder. In short, she’d ripped out a chunk dead-center of his head. The squawking, paired with his fetching new monkish hairstyle, had caused Geralt’s chest to compress: he’d laughed.</p><p>Jaskier had never heard such deep chimes from a man; hadn’t known people were capable of such a rich sound.</p><p>Huddled at the base of the tree, Jaskier breathed.</p><p><em>In, out.</em> <em>There’s a lad – you just keep breathin’. I know it’s hard.</em></p><p>Gods, there were so many moments: the time he’d been trusted enough to assist in spoiling Geralt with a bath; the day after the djinn where he’d softly apologized for insulting Jaskier’s singing; the morning Geralt had returned from a dead-end hunt.</p><p><em>That </em>particular morning had started with Geralt downing one of his toxic potions – the one that made his black pupils bleed – in preparation for the hunt, before he’d furiously realized he’d been sold a sack of horseshit. He had come storming back into camp, heaving like bellows. Jaskier had tended to his snarling body all night – overstimulated, senses sending painful signals that had overwhelmed the witcher and, ironically, left him vulnerable.</p><p>Jaskier had kept the fire going to combat Geralt’s shakes, had squeezed him as tightly as he dared, had kept up a running soft commentary on all his political machinations for next year’s bardic competition and how those coxcombs wouldn’t know what hit them, until the sun inched her way back to life and Geralt had finally succumbed to sleep.</p><p>It was one of Jaskier’s best memories. It had shown that Geralt, at the very least, had trusted him. Even just for a moment.</p><p>Jaskier exhaled, fingers lightly tracing his ears.</p><p>
  <em>Another story, laddie? Well – alright, then. I’ll tell you about the ladies of the wood. You’ll need to know them in future, if you’re one of my wee bairns. </em>
</p><p>Once, in the late days of autumn, a successful spell of busking in the cities of Temeria had left him high on coin. Geralt had been pricklier than usual. The pinched look in Geralt’s forehead had foretold of his exhaustion with civilization. Human cities were so packed with sound and smell and taste and noise and <em>people.</em> Jaskier knew it got to the witcher’s senses – probably was what had pulled his shoulders up to his ears, he was so paranoid of attack.</p><p>Instead of spending his hard-earned crowns (<em>his</em> coin, mind – Geralt’s prospects began to dry up mid-September; Jaskier had always been so proud to feed their bellies and purchase their rooms. To be dependable, even in small ways), Jaskier had insisted upon abandoning their perfectly serviceable beds under a sturdy roof and instead returning to the great wastes beyond Dorian where the mountains shot up into the sky and one could feel deliciously small. His request to leave comfort for the wastes had been met with an unimpressed stare. Jaskier had said <em>Geralt, come </em>on<em>. Even you witcher-folk must comprehend the sublime.</em></p><p>Geralt had grunted, <em>They’re rocks. Big ones.</em></p><p>But it hadn't been a no. They had made camp under a spread of stars, the moon an absent mother, and had watched the first snows of the season fall on the mountain peaks while sharing a bottle of sweet Redanian wine Jaskier had managed to smuggle past Roach’s wandering bites (his apples, however, he’d been forced to surrender).</p><p>They’d stayed up for hours, just murmuring about nothing important, just breathing the same air. Geralt had rested – just for a moment – his hand atop Jaskier’s. <em>Thank you</em>, he’d said.</p><p>
  <em>The ladies – they always wanted children, y’see. Saw mothers with their own babes and craved the feel of a soft body in your arms. Eventually, they got too greedy. </em>
</p><p>The air here smelled just like his washerwoman's hair. Jaskier remembers the white scars on the back of her hands. Lye didn’t disfigure like that. Magic – cursed magic, the kind that oozes like pitch in your veins – surely does.</p><p>He stood up. There was no washerwoman to haggle for the child’s life; no ear to offer that would slake their lust for motherhood, not even his. Geralt wasn’t going to make it in time.</p><p>
  <em>They love you, laddie, those ladies. They’ve been waiting a very long time to meet you.</em>
</p><p>He stepped forward, into the gloom.</p><p>This, he could do.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>Notes: </strong>
</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrEX4_UVb8A">The ladies of the wood</a> are from The Witcher 3, seen in Geralt’s quest to find a much more grown Ciri, and they’re so fucky omg. They live in a tapestry? But like they’re so physically twisted from eating kids. It’s my understanding that they “employ” (read: enslave) a kind old woman who takes care of orphans and like “protects” most of the kids if you just sacrifice a couple to them.
<ul>
<li>It is heavily implied that Jaskier’s adoptive unnamed mom “the washerwoman” (bc the author is so great at details like names ahahah) was the previous enslaved woman.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>As far as I can tell, Belltyn is equivalent to Beltane, the pagan fertility festival.</li>
<li>Julianski is Polish-Julian, so. I dunno I liked it. Thanks to Sunflower_Fairy, I learned that Julianski is a surname, not a forename, which kinda works super well with the abusive family shtick but I also apologize for my weird smashing cultural languages together into... whatever this is.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/61819/42-old-english-insults">Gnashgabby</a> old medieval insult. A “gnashgab’ is someone who can only complain.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://i.redd.it/doxsk8fbxl641.png">I used this map to reference</a> locations because lord knows I can’t keep track of Polish names, I’m so sorry for my English-ineptitude with languages. ;__;</li>
<li>“ain’t” wasn’t a thing in medieval times (that I could find; I checked), so I modified the late great Bill Withers’ <em>Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone.</em> It’s such a simple, perfect song made by his singing – something I figured Jaskier’d be into. :)</li>
<li>Hey so did you know Jaskier’s surname “Pancratz” means basically <a href="https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=pankratz">“almighty conqueror-slash-God?”</a>
<ul>
<li>How fucking appropriate is THAT for my weird ass STORY. <strong><em>HHNNNG----</em></strong>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="https://culture.pl/en/article/9-supernatural-beings-places-of-polish-folklore">Chapel of Skulls</a> - Czermna is a village in Lower Silesia in the far south of Poland (which is Czechia today via Google Maps but is also still called Poland so what is the truth). There’s a church with a chapel made of over 3,000 bodies, the mastermind of a priest and a gravedigger. It’s so fuckin metal y’all. Inside are a crucifix and two carvings of angels, one with a Latin inscription that reads 'Arise from the Dead' (<em>Exsurge a mortuis</em>)</li>
<li>
<a href="https://allthatsinteresting.com/ancient-ecuador-skull-helmets">Babies in Ecuador were buried with skull helmets</a>, of the Guangala culture, made from the skulls of other dead infants. There’s evidence the kids wore the skulls in life, too, and that the babies were possibly an offering for better harvests (volcanic ash = malnutrition, it seems), or some kind of rebirth symbol.
<ul>
<li>So <em>this</em> spawned the idea of some <em>weird ass</em> warrior training culture where everyone wears a skull as a helmet.</li>
<li>And Jaskier is the rebirth. He’s it, it was just a myth until he came along and proved it and scared his daddy shitless so they buried him alive. Which doesn’t <em>work for a deathless warrior cult.</em>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
<em>“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting… It is the unemotional, reserved, calm, detached warrior who wins, not the hothead…” – </em>taken from The Art of War.</li>
</ul><p>Listen I basically made Jaskier the heir of some weird death-cult Spartan warrior family with some cool magic shit spun in there for funsies, that he <em>completely</em> rejects. I got deep into the dead, y’all. Mixed all kinds of cultures into this weird Witcher thing. :) Please excuse my creative liberties.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. part 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>
  <strong>      19: root rot<strike></strike></strong>
</p><p>He stumbles when he approaches the house because the world is… almost muted here. There is a faint ringing in Jaskier’s ears, the like of which he’s only experienced after the insidiously quiet moments of his life: the diedown of a bardic competition after-party, when he’s the last one to leave because he has nowhere else to go; the morning-afters where Geralt has left him and he is alone; the wet gasp of air from his dying brothers because of the blood filling their lungs.</p><p>It’s too quiet here. Unnaturally so.</p><p>(He cannot hear the panicked drumbeat that lured him here. Disquieting.)</p><p>He keeps his footsteps soft as he approaches. The structure might’ve once been homely but the eaves were now shabby, the thatched roof (belching out smoke; someone was definitely inside) sagged as though someone had sat on it. The windows lacked glass and looked more like black poxmarks on the house. The front porch’s steps had been stomped on and split, presumably because someone had thrown a tantrum.</p><p>Nothing is growing. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but the lush plantlife that warred with itself for growing space abruptly stopped. The house sat in a circle of dead dirt.</p><p>It's so quiet.</p><p>Jaskier studies the ground, avoiding stepping in the already-present footprints in the soft mud. They were much smaller than his. Most had flattened out as the earth shifted – but a fresh track was still deep enough to hold small puddles of water in the arch and heel of the footprint.</p><p>Children’s footsteps leading to a house of death in the middle of a forest. It was just like the setting from his washerwoman’s tales. He’d never much liked this one, the one with the three ladies, but his surrogate mother insisted on his memorization of it.</p><p>
  <em>They do like it when folk lend an ear, but should you ever wish to speak to them, it’s important to address them properly. </em>
</p><p>Jaskier sheds himself like a coat.</p><p>He finds the corner of his mind he has spent lifetimes burying and channels his father – the military posture, the aristocratic blank smile. The eyes that betray his training. He was born amongst bones and bred for war and he <em>knows</em> how to perform strength, just as well as he knows how to slit a man’s throat.</p><p>He can’t hear anything – no trills from the stars, no whispers from the mist. Just the ringing in his ears. There is no song to save him. He’s not – not Jaskier anymore, really.</p><p>He approaches the house and steps in the child-sized footprints, quashes them into his own. He requires no air. He makes no noise.</p><p>He opens the door. It wasn’t locked; who would need to lock a witch coven’s door? He registers the dried bats and animal skulls decorating the dark room, notes the light source of the fireplace and the glittering candles strewn about the room. He cannot detect another breathing soul in the house – not even the dead call to him from beneath.</p><p>He would almost call it peaceful, if he were someone else.</p><p>The hut is empty – but for the massive painting, above the hearth, of three women. It is an old painting. Amidst a black background, they are dancing. Their clothes are insufficient in masking their naked bodies. One holds a basket, one eats from the basket with red hands, and one holds a knife. They are beautiful. They are looking at him.</p><p>He approaches, a mild smile on his lips. He hears nothing but the space holding its breath in anticipation. He recalls this, spoken by a woman who’d loved him:</p><p>
  <em>Ladies, lovely, with power over all. Beseech I they: answer my call. Before you a worm crawls, wretched and small.</em>
</p><p>He says, “Hello, ladies,” and the painting shrieks with glee.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      20: <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1os8Kp-BQ3Dye3YavNTywvPAvhIJE9nWq/view?usp=sharing">the ladies of the wood</a><strike></strike></strong>
</p><p>He notices the air ripple. The bones on the wall rattle pleasantly. The candles valiantly do not snuff out. There is no change to the painting, but he senses – not life, not respiration or bloodflow through veins, nothing that he could describe as living, but.</p><p>He turns, slowly. He wastes no movement.</p><p>The ladies walk from shadow into the meek light. Their steps were heavy and wet, their bodies lumbering and large. He blinks, slowly, categorizing his childish story-versions to their physical counterparts.</p><p><em>“Greetings, my lord</em>,” the ladies of the wood cackle.</p><p>Three indeed there were: one short, one fat, all tall. Bodyparts festooned their bodies, sloppily sliced and linked together around their necks or stuffed into a stained pinafore. Rope was wound tightly around the gut of the largest, the second lady; her fat was an infectious pink color. A severed hand was stowed in the apron pocket of the first, bent like a leper with a twisted spine. She who wore the ripped noose around her neck – the third lady – twitched and twisted like a fly. Jaskier heard buzzing, hissing, like a fight—</p><p>“<em>Oooh</em>,” her voice buzzed. “<em>We didn’t know he was so handsome</em>!” said the third lady of the wood. Insects crawl from the protruding hive that consumes her right eye. The other two ladies hid their faces behind a crude basket and what could have been a wedding veil. <em>“We never thought m’lord would be so – delectable.”</em> A flash of a wet, gray tongue wets her thin lips.</p><p>He found himself employing every trick Jaskier had learned at court to summon a smile for the hags. Warcraft had little place amongst the ladies. His plans shifted. “My <em>dear</em> ladies!” he says, bowing with a flourish. “To which undeserving deity do I owe the pleasure of your company?”</p><p>All of the ladies of the wood brandish their fingers, crowned with pus and stretched skin and blood, as they simper and giggle. He kneels and kisses the first lady’s hand. It was the size of a dog. Something crawled under her skin as his lips made contact – a tick, perhaps. A blood clot. An undigested bit of person.</p><p>“You have my most humble apologies, my ladies, for I did not call. I am terribly sorry to impugn on your simply ravishing citadel,” he did not flick a glance at the collapsed wooden cabin, as Jaskier would, “but might the ladies of the wood be willing to help me locate a wayward possession?”</p><p>They wore no expressions, but the energy in the room shifted – the same way it does at weddings, when the bride is kissed, or a beggarchild finds a gold coin. <em>“YES!!”</em> they scream, their bodies barely able to contain the excitement. They move closer, reaching out as though to touch him. He keeps his expression affably content.</p><p><em>“Our death-begot needs us,”</em> the first cackles in a melodic tone. The veil did not move as she spoke. She favored her right ankle, only just, well hidden amongst the rags of her apron that stored severed hands. Anyone else would have missed it. <em>“Oh, rapturous day – an elder blood feast </em>and<em> a god-visitation! Sisters, are we not lucky?”</em></p><p>They crow and stomp out a quickstep – perhaps a facsimile of the dancing in the painting behind him. They are beautiful. They are grotesque. They are looking at him.</p><p><em>“Good you got to us before the witcher,”</em> they spit.</p><p>Since melting from the dark places in the house, they had been steadily moving closer. He notes their surrounding pattern and made adjustments to his plans; their bodily placement changed little. They could not stop him.</p><p>He very carefully tips his head to the side and smiles with all his teeth. “Oh? A witcher? My dear ladies, I thought those nasty creatures extinct!” He notes the number of windows – there are four, one in the cobwebby rafters. There is one door. There are three ladies of the wood.</p><p>They cackle, a dry hack soaked in exhilaration. Something thick and wet and white dribbled from the third lady’s thin mouth. <em>“Almost,”</em> she sang. <em>“Just a few pests left.”</em></p><p><em>“The white-one, it’s close,”</em> the red-veiled lady hisses with glee. <em>“So close, my lord, it’s so very close.”</em></p><p>His heart wants to pound, but he doesn’t allow it.</p><p><em>“Exterminate it,”</em> another lady snarled. <em>“We will, m’lord, we would eat its flesh for you.” </em></p><p>He moves his facial muscles to pantomime how Jaskier behaved when courted by a courtesan that wasn’t his – an expression of soft, tragic gratuity, as though he couldn’t believe the kindness being shown him. His mouth made a soft “oh.” He touched his chest. He looked down – that was key, looking down, it implied humility – and then took a step toward the third lady of the wood. He cupped a palm around the lady’s face, a thumb stroking under her hooked nose. Her skin felt like wax paper, but wet – pulpy, slimy, false.</p><p>“My darlings,” he says, and the lady’s gray face trembled, “I would like nothing better.” The ladies gasp and the third wraps a clawed hand around his wrist. The second lady – the one with the basket-head and oozing pink tits, with a doll choked in the rope around her waist – wriggled, moving even closer, and puts her meaty paws on his body at the same time as the first (the first lady’s huge hands were cold, frigid almost, as they caressed his back).</p><p>He moves to kiss the second lady’s hand, the one that enveloped his shoulder like a cancer. It was blood-hot. The skin pulsed under his lips. “But,” he sighs, “duty calls. I must first find what is missing from my stock. I am bade to do my,” and he wasn’t sure what to call it but when tapping into Jaskier’s talent for staying out of trouble, he found the word: “craft.”</p><p>The ladies move closer, as though to comfort him. The first – the one melding to his back – cups a cold hand on his cheek. Her breath was ice. It smelled of rot – sickly sweet, teasing at what it once was. Her necklace of severed ears tickles his neck. They felt soft. <em>“My lord,”</em> she whispers in his ear, <em>“we are but here to serve.”</em></p><p>He inhales. He exhales. It is good to remind them of what he is. The three ladies surround him. He smells decay, the sweat of sickness, and the iron tang of blood. He says, “I am looking for a child.”</p><p><em>“Oh, this one has good taste, sisters. You must be famished,”</em> the third one with the face says. She is pantomiming a mother. She bares her teeth. He thinks she is smiling. <em>“Lucky we caught fresh meat.”</em></p><p><em>“Yes, sister!”</em> the second one screeches, squeezing his shoulder until it creaked. The rope was tightly bound under her left breast – where the heart would have been. The skin looked soft; it would give with enough pressure. <em>“What is ours is yours, my lord.”</em></p><p>The first lady twists her head around his. Her red veil flutters as she speaks, “<em>Death is best fresh – would you not agree?”</em></p><p>The third chimes in with a hiss, a maggot wiggling from the hive in her right eye, <em>“Yes, sisters – we must share. Our lord’s needs are our own.”</em></p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      21: the child, the feast<strike></strike></strong>
</p><p>They take him to the shadows.</p><p>He wonders if this is it – if this is when he will know, have solid, uncompromising proof, that he is the death-begot his father wasn’t. Befuddling ancient crones and summoning the dead isn’t enough; he’d interrogated Geralt enough to learn others have those powers, albeit watered down. If he can move amongst shadows – there will be no further questions.</p><p>But they don’t take him far. In the back of the crumbling house lies Ciri, dim and sallow in a crib she doesn’t fit in. Her body looked unnatural, her limbs compressed to fit her already small frame inside the infant-sized bed. Her hair was flat and sandy. Her skin pale, like ice. He wondered why he couldn’t sense her and realizes she isn’t breathing.</p><p>He’s too late.</p><p><em>“See?”</em> the first lady hisses. She is giddy and close to his body. <em>“See, my lord? We caught such a prize – her blood will keep us alive for generations, my lord; do you see?”</em></p><p><em>“Don’t be greedy, sister; she’s not for us,”</em> the third one buzzes angrily. <em>“She’s for our lord.”</em></p><p>He is still surrounded by their overlarge bodies – they simpered and supped at his attention like tongues, dipping in and out, trying to tease out what he wanted. His many plans have narrowed; to get out alive, with Ciri, has become close. Time limits choice. He has options; none of them are difficult, but he doesn’t like most of them. He doesn’t like himself very much.</p><p>He hears something, outside. It is soft, uneven, like a creature remembering how to walk. That it was muffled in this cellhouse of silence meant it was close.</p><p>“Before you, a worm crawls,” he finds himself saying. The ladies collectively compress their bodies – a physical response they cannot control. He would have named it agony but for the third lady’s face, which betrayed ecstasy. “I beseech you, ladies – lovely ladies with power over all – let me hold you in thrall, won’t you? For I do recall,” he stands tall and wishes he were anywhere else, "what it is to crawl."</p><p><em>“Yes,”</em> the ladies of the wood hissed. He would call it rapture, but it wasn’t.</p><p>“Wake,” he said softly to Ciri’s body, as well as, “Come to me.” He did not say this to Ciri’s body, nor did he speak it to the ladies.</p><p>Outside, the earth shifted.</p><p><em>“My lord?”</em> said the third lady, head cocked like an insect. It wasn’t a harsh command; he didn’t need to hold them long. Her weak points were obvious, he noted, as another bug crawled from her skull, which was badly wrapped under the red-stitched hat. <em>“Do you not crave the flesh of dead babes?” </em></p><p>A test; she hadn’t noticed her enthrallment.</p><p>Of course he enjoyed it – he’s supposed to. Legend begets that he consume the flesh of his slain brothers and ascend.</p><p>He does not answer her. He moves to touch her hand, thumbing his way between her fingers. She trembles. She would not notice what was coming.</p><p>“It’s best fresh, no?” he says mildly, looking at the other sisters who crowded in for his attention. The candlelight did not penetrate this corner – it would not show the wet shine of hungry eyes, moving closer. They were almost positioned. “Nothing but the best for my lovely ladies, above all.”</p><p>Many things happened simultaneously – just as he’d planned.</p><p>Ciri’s eyes flutter. Her chest rises, diaphragm compressing wetly into her not-yet necrotic body. Jaskier wants to sob because he wasn’t sure he could bring her back – alive. He cannot, though. It would give away his position.</p><p>He allowed this because he only needed a few more moments: the three ladies caress his face – his flesh, his hands, his hair. The dead always want to touch him.</p><p>Hands reach through the black windows. They are sallow, yellow-skinned, and dead. They are who he summoned when he bade Ciri wake. He commands them to stay silent as the ladies feast on his presence, as they touched his flesh. He bade them surround him and they moved as a trained unit without a thought.</p><p>The dead swarm the three ladies. They do not notice; he's not entirely sure why. Possibly because they trusted him.</p><p>He quietly steps out of their reach as a ghoulish Nilfgardian soldier bites into the third one’s eye – a weak spot, just as he’d thought. Centipedes pour from the maggoty hole as the third lady of the wood screams loud enough to burst eardrums. Ciri will be fine.</p><p>The other ladies are beset with five, eight, twenty dead men and the house was now host to a gruesome feeding. He’s never tried pitting the dead against each other. He doesn’t want to watch.</p><p>He shadow-walks to Ciri as more dead people stream into the house – dropping from the window in the rafters, crawling through the door, moaning and gnashing their empty teeth. There are no children’s corpses and he doesn’t need to ask why. He wonders how many had been parents.</p><p>The ladies roar as their victims consume them.</p><p>Blessedly, Ciri does not wake from slumber. He hopes she is alive. He breaks the shabby wood of the crib and lifts her into his arms. The ladies were all screaming now. There is a window nearby – it will be hard to walk through the sheer number of corpses pouring through the door, scrabbling to get a piece of the ladies with whatever limbs they have left. To leave via the door would involve wading through corpses. All of them will want to touch him. He cannot risk Ciri waking to that.</p><p>He thinks he has summoned too many. He’s never tried… as he is now.</p><p>Ciri is warm in his arms as he turns to the agonized shrieking of the three ladies. The screams rumble in his chest, gaining depth and timber. He assesses; the dead, in their frenzy, have knocked over the candles on the mantle – the painting of the three beautiful women is on fire.</p><p>Oh. He hadn’t meant for that.</p><p><em>“Coward!” </em>the ladies of the wood scream as they are consumed – by fire, by teeth, by death. This had been his backup plan, unused because of its uncertainty. It is difficult for the ladies to speak due to the sheer number of bodies clinging to them like ticks. He doesn’t like himself very much. <em>“We loved you! For this - you will never stop!"</em> They stop to wail as they are devoured.<em> "You will never be chosen! You will never live! You will never </em>BE<em>!”</em></p><p>They don’t say anything he doesn’t already know.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      22: once, before</strong>
</p><p>The thing is, Jaskier has been around a long time. (Not alive, he can’t really say he’s been alive – that would require him to be living). He’d heard of witchers, of their exploits, of their genocide. He’s not sure why he decided to follow around the white-haired man with a body that looks like a weapon – not sure why he knew he had to be this man’s biographer and that his life’s story had to be musical, not blasé; had to be beautiful, not lost in history like all other stories are.</p><p>He’d met another witcher, before Geralt. That’s why Geralt is interesting; he’s different. He’s important.</p><p>Jaskier had never caught the first witcher he had met’s name because the bastards were stingy about <em>everything</em>, apparently, but the witcher had been inescapably what he was. Jaskier could relate.</p><p>He’d barely been Jaskier back then – still stretching into the fine clothes that didn’t match his face, still kissing people to see if anyone would stay, still twinkling out fucking outstanding music that was starting to get him into trouble with notoriety and fame. (He’d always been too proud for his father’s tastes). The day he’d met his first witcher, he’d been off in the wilds, trying to avoid a king’s summoning because he hadn’t aged much in forty years and didn’t know how a bard said no to a king.</p><p>(They don’t – he’s learned this since. It’s kind of why he was hiding in the Blue Mountains.)</p><p>The witcher had been alone. Jaskier had been in the treetops – lots of nasty things living in the Blue Mountains, good lord – and had only spotted him because of the jaunty-red headcovering that seemed to wrap around a greasy bun. An odd, interesting choice for a witcher. He wonders how much identity a witcher gets to keep.</p><p>He’d made as much noise as he thought a normal person would and still startled the witcher as he waltzed into the man’s campsite. After much groveling and splayed hands in the air and sniveling for his very <em>bardic, </em>very harmless self’s continued existence, he’d finally been deemed a non-threat and allowed to ask for the man’s name.</p><p>“My <em>name</em> is witcher,” the man had grouched, sheathing his giant sword. He’d made a show (and Jaskier was a performer, he recognized an act when he saw one) of turning his back and begin the process of decoupling his armor. Jaskier was a master of knowing when someone was full of shit.</p><p>He’d been surprised to see the man was smaller than he’d estimated from the treetops– out of his armor and boots, the witcher’s bowed legs had tapered off into stubby feet that softly padded around. Obviously, Jaskier had known witchers had <em>feet</em>, but it was strange seeing the grass sneak between his toes rather than the stomping boots he’d been used to.</p><p>He’d seemed – human. Approachable. Defeasible, in that light.</p><p>Despite (or perhaps because of) the shedding of his outermost skin, the witcher’s eyes had followed him everywhere – sharp, bright, calculating. Trust was not to be given here, not lightly. Jaskier had made a point of chewing slowly and telegraphing his movements with overly enthusiastic gesturing – something a drunken fool might do. Something a harmless bard might perform.</p><p>He’d badgered and whittled the witcher down (watching his face carefully, gauging if the stormclouds in his expression were truly black) until, finally, the man had cracked. “You know what they say about bards?” the man had scoffed, scraping a stick into a pike for the fish he’d caught for his – and <em>only </em>his the witcher had threatened, despite already sharing his rations with Jaskier – dinner. “They’re half-wits and full of shit.”</p><p>Jaskier’s face had fallen open. That hadn’t been a particularly inspired insult at <em>all.</em></p><p>“Oh! Well – well you know what they say about witchers.” He’d paused for dramatic effect (and to watch the souring of the witcher’s face) – <em>and</em> because he hadn’t the slightest idea what people said about witchers, other than… “When they’re not killing monsters, they’re killing time.”</p><p>A laugh had startled out of the witcher’s chest.</p><p>The man had looked shocked, as though he were assessing what his body had just performed. As though he had little reason to laugh. Jaskier recognizes that pain too.</p><p>They talked. That’s all his first witcher meeting was: a conversation.</p><p>Talking – conversing, sharing ideas, true communication – makes Jaskier feel alive. He thinks it’s why he never quiets. As a child, he had been backhanded if he’d spoken after a loss which, for most of his life, has been constant. Loss was to be borne with silence.</p><p>He was glad for the practice before Geralt – glad to make the social faux pas with the nameless witcher than with the one he wants to spend the rest of his (life?) with.</p><p>He thinks of those two outcasts, an abandoned death-god experiment and a witcher sharing a bottle of wine in the shadow of the witchers’ lair, hidden in those mountains. Jaskier remembers having felt ebullient that long summer afternoon in the Blue Mountains, words like sugar dissolving on his tongue. He remembers coming to know witchers as people, not legends or myths or boogeymen in children’s tales, but flesh-and-bone <em>people</em>. He’d looked into the witcher’s cat-like eyes and had found kinship.</p><p>“Will you tell me your name <em>now</em>?” Jaskier had asked, smilingly, at the conclusion of that fantastic midsummer’s day. He’d found that he’d quite liked witchers and wanted to spread this man’s good intentions.</p><p>He’d been stared at for a long moment, the witcher’s scarred face having been contemplative. He’d eventually said, “You’re not bad – for a bard.” Then he’d shouldered his massive sword and left for the small castle that would someday become the colossal Kaer Morhen.</p><p>(“Come with me,” Geralt didn’t say; had never said. “Come to Kaer Morgan.”)</p><p>As he carries Ciri’s body out of the haunted shack of the ladies of the wood, praying the princess doesn’t wake to this, praying she will never know what killed her (or what brought her back), he doesn’t feel anything like a witcher. He feels like the things Geralt was tasked to put in the ground.</p><p>(They’d tried that once, with an iron lid. It hadn’t stuck.)</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>      23: trust</strong>
</p><p>He carried Ciri with rapid footsteps, away from the screaming shack overflowing with bodies (and more, more and more and <em>more</em> were shaking off their graves and rising to his call; he’d tripped over a dead woman’s hand as she crawled from the earth they were coming so quickly—), through the trees festooned with human ears that brushed against him so lovingly. He marched them both away, through the soft mists that hushed in his ears, until the moon clang brightly overhead and he could <em>breathe</em> and the screaming couldn’t be heard anymore (or – maybe it had finally stopped).</p><p>Jaskier stumbled, legs weak and quaking, into a tree trunk. He allowed himself a moment to collapse – still clutching the princess close, still monitoring her heartrate, still unbelieving she was alive.</p><p>He crushed his ear to the bark, which bit into his cheek but he didn’t care; he wanted to hear one of the first songs he’d known upon emerging from his own grave, lifetimes ago, when he’d found solace in a dying tree (planted in a desert graveyard by an ill-educated groundsman, as though it would survive). The murmuring polyrhythms of vein-water, the crunch of bark, the soft shift of leaves; it was so soothing to him. Like a lullaby. It paired so well with Ciri’s steady drumbeat of her pulse.</p><p>He closed his eyes, exhaled. Felt the unmistakable icy tip of metal cut into his throat.</p><p>Jaskier’s eyes flew open.</p><p>Geralt.</p><p>Geralt was pointing his silver sword at Jaskier’s neck.</p><p>It had sliced into him, only just; gentle enough to feel painless and deep enough to draw blood.</p><p>“<em>Release</em> her,” Geralt snarled.</p><p>Jaskier did. Ciri had begun to squirm faintly, like she could sense the tense atmosphere she was an unconscious participant in, but quickly woke when Geralt grabbed her by the arm and tugged. He wore all black, his battle gear. He kept the sword pointed at Jaskier. He kept his yellow eyes fixed on Jaskier.</p><p>(Jaskier tried, very desperately, to remind himself of what he must look like. He is covered in blood that isn’t his. He is alone. He has Ciri, alone. He hasn’t seen this man in a year. He is not and is never going to be this man’s choice.)</p><p>Cirilla gave a soft whine as her body collided with the mountain-hewn witcher, who was solid as rock (<em>and twice as dense</em>, he used to joke. He can’t. He can’t say anything, he’d cut his own throat, he’s a threat, he’s an enemy—). Jaskier can still find gratitude in that she did not wake to meet the ladies’ end.</p><p>Geralt pushed Ciri with intent so her body was shielded by his. Jaskier was a threat.</p><p>“What are you,” he said. His sword – weighing at least two stone, Jaskier had tried to lift it once – did not waver.</p><p>“Geralt—” Ciri pawed at Geralt’s thickly armored arm, hitting him in a way that looked as effective as flies badgering an elephant. “Hey—”</p><p><em>“What are you!”</em> Geralt snarled, leaning into and above Jaskier, looming like a planet over an ant. He couldn’t hear the tree-song anymore. Jaskier could feel the steady trickle of blood slide down his neck, past his shoulder, moving steadily toward the fertile earth. He breathed, carefully; if the blood were to make contact with soil… he wouldn’t be able to stop it, as himself. Geralt is looking at him like he’s juice from a latrine, like he’s a kikimora’s bastard, like he’s never seen Jaskier before. He wants to cry. Ciri began striking in earnest, getting louder and so were the dead scratching underneath them, scenting his lifeblood and no, no, gods no he desperately doesn’t want Geralt to see him as anything but a bard.</p><p><em>“Answer </em>me, creature,” Geralt moved forward and his swordpoint cut into the tree and <em>fuck, </em>the shrill steel-song of pain was deafening to him this close to her trunk; his blood came faster, “<em>What are you?”</em></p><p>“<em>Stop</em> it!” Ciri screamed. Jaskier felt his body leave the ground – heard a disorienting high-pitched whine as he became airborne – and crashed headfirst into a knotted pine, completely winded. Geralt hadn’t fared much better, but he’d managed to keep his feet.</p><p>Ciri was a picture of fury: eyes bright, fists clenched, shoulders wide. Geralt had taught her well. “Leave him alone! He’s just a bard – <em>my </em>birthday bard – and he’s my <em>friend!</em>”</p><p>Geralt looked at him, sizing him up with those devastating cat-like eyes. He didn’t point the silver longsword at him, but neither did he sheathe it. “What <em>are</em> you?” he repeated.</p><p>Jaskier, who had since used one hand to stop the blood flow from his neck and the other to pull himself out of the prickly branches and brush off the pointiest ones as gracefully as possible, helplessly shrugged. Coils of shame squeezed his throat and burned worse than the cut he bore; he could hardly speak with their presence. He choked out the most honest answer he had: “A bard.”</p><p>Geralt’s eyes narrow at his answer. Jaskier remembers that he sold his lute ages ago, carried absolutely nothing on his person but the sad plainclothes of a traveler (he’d shed himself, he was on his way south to <em>bury</em> himself—), and lurched to modify his answer as his hand slid, slippery with blood; he needed to clot this and quickly), “Well – an unemployed bard, at present, but the world’s ending so—”</p><p>“Jaskier,” Geralt interrupted. He still hadn’t lowered his sword. The grip on its pommel shifted, as though Geralt were hesitant of its use. “Tell me something I can trust.”</p><p>“<em>Geralt!”</em> Ciri shouted, her hands in tiny fists. “He got me <em>out</em>, okay? He saved me from the Nilfgardians <em>and</em> the,” she paused to swallow, “the disgusting, fucking witches—”</p><p>Jaskier panicked. Geralt had glanced at Ciri – the first time he’d looked away from Jaskier since they’d been blown away by Ciri’s shrill scream – and he cannot be allowed to do the damn witchery thing and <em>investigate; </em>Geralt didn’t stand a chance against a goddamn army of the undead. Jaskier knows the witcher won’t let this go, he was like a dog with a bone when it came to monsters. He can’t just tell him the <em>truth</em>, that would take too much time to explain (and the notion of Jaskier being capable of dispatching three divine horrors without a scratch would <em>not </em>be entertained).</p><p>He felt the prodding of the waking dead beneath him, like a bird tapping on a window. They’d be here soon. It was imperative to get Geralt and his charge <em>out; </em>he needed to prove he was Jaskier quickly<em>. </em>What else was there to say but—</p><p>“You’re not really from Rivia,” he gasped out, trying to contain his breathing because there was so much to pay attention to – the movement below their feet, the ears still noosed from the treetops; they weren’t far away enough yet, he’s so tired it was getting hard to  – but he couldn’t take his eyes from Geralt’s, which were focused on him. “You just picked it because you needed a surname.”</p><p>Ciri was clutching his sword-arm’s sleeve, as though she could best Geralt in a test of strength when her safety was in consideration, and Geralt’s grip on his weapon didn’t change. Yeah, that was probably common knowledge.</p><p>“You – you attended Oxfenfurt once,” he continued, licking his lips. “I found the records while, ah, chasing a muse. You studied biology.”</p><p>Geralt blinked. A man who had died sixteen years ago from cancer, body forgetting <em>how</em> to die, was mouthing at the topsoil from his lonely grave. Someone’s mother wailed, silenced by the dirt clogging her bony mouth. Scores of them, some so old they were barely bones, couldn’t help but be lured by the hot blood spilling into the earth, trickling down his forearm. Minutes left, maybe.</p><p>“You <em>detest</em> having a beard,” he gestured weakly to the dirty scruff framing Geralt’s face. “You always borrowed my razor to shave it off when we...”</p><p>Geralt still looked wary as he lowered his leather-clad arm, sword pointed at the ground. The moonlight glared off of his brilliant hair and Jaskier couldn’t breathe for a moment; he never thought he’d see this again. “Jaskier,” the witcher sighed, “what the <em>fuck</em> is going on—”</p><p>A fingertip poked through the earth, like a devil’s garden. Jaskier scrambled to stand, making sure to plant a firm foot on the finger. He was still bleeding. He demanded the three of them make haste <em>out</em> of this cesspool of creepy shit – Ciri’s mouth made a tentative attempt to smile at his description of the hag-bog – when twenty-four bodies started crawling out from the dirt they stood on; choking out soil that had been occupying the open spaces of their bodies for decades; groaning out sad sounds.</p><p>Geralt had pivoted in less than half a second, moving Ciri’s body behind him and into Jaskier’s. He’d established a defensive position in front of them both. They needed to <em>run</em>, he couldn’t staunch the bleeding, and he knows his begot-blood only boils the ghouls’ frenzy. He cannot control them when they’re starving. There are a hundred strong coming, the cavalry following his scent from the ladies of the wood, so even if by some miracle they survived the first wave—They’re going to lose.</p><p>Ciri tucked her small body into his. Her eyes spoke of age as she watched dead people rise as hungry monsters, dirty teeth gnashing, their noises strangely wet. He is glad she didn’t scream; it wouldn’t’ve made a difference. As the cancerous man’s hand rose from the ground and grasped his shoe, as Geralt began his fruitless assault against a growing ghoul patch – he couldn’t keep Ciri and himself alive, he’d have to choose who to save and the rigid line of his shoulders betrayed Geralt’s feelings – Jaskier made a decision.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>---</p><p>And, scene.</p><p>Thank y’all so much for your patience! I work in schools and this past year has been – well, uh, terrible. Writing horror is a strange escape. I apologize so much for my fucked up tenses, it’s bad but getting better.</p><p>I love your comments and kudos so much!! Every time I get one my ADHD brain spazzes out motivation, so gawbless.</p><p>I also revised the first two chunks, so re-read them for much better grammar if you like!!</p><p>Notes!</p><ul>
<li>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrEX4_UVb8A">The ladies of the wood</a> are from The Witcher 3, seen in Geralt’s quest to find a much more grown Ciri, and they’re so fucky omg. They live in a tapestry? But like they’re so physically twisted from eating kids. It’s my understanding that they “employ” (read: enslave) a kind old woman who takes care of orphans and like “protects” most of the kids if you just sacrifice a couple to them.
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<li>It is heavily implied that Jaskier’s adoptive unnamed mom “the washerwoman” bc the author is so great at details like names ahahah was the previous enslaved woman.</li>
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</li>
<li>Vesemir’s dumb red headcovering is <a href="https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Vesemir?file=Comics_Vesemir.jpg">based on this picture</a> of him as a young man. It – does kinda look dumb but I love him.</li>
<li>All those facts Jaskier knows about Geralt are true! :)</li>
<li>Listen I basically made Jaskier the heir of some weird death-cult Spartan warrior family with some cool magic shit spun in there for funsies. I got deep into the dead, y’all. Mixed all kinds of cultures into this weird Witcher thing. :) Please excuse my creative liberties.</li>
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